Lynda Weinman – Women of Interaction Design

Lynda Weinman

Written by Erin Malone

Perhaps best known for Lynda.com, the website that trained a generation of web designers and developers, Lynda Weinman started her work with the Macintosh in the mid-eighties. She began to design graphics and animations, and worked on a series of movies, "RoboCop 2" (1990), "Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure" (1989), and "Star Trek V: The Final Frontier" (1989), as a contractor for Dreamquest, in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

Book covers from many of the web graphics, web design and html training books authored by Lynda Weinman.

She started to teach others how to do these things both as a consultant and a professor— teaching at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena from 1989 to 1996. Education soon became her driving passion, and she started to write magazine articles and authored her first book designing web graphics in 1995, quickly followed by coloring web graphics with her husband Bruce Heavin in1996. She authored designing web graphics 2, preparing web graphics and coloring web graphics 2 in 1997. Creative html design and deconstructing web graphics came about in 1998 and a 3rd edition of designing web graphics 3 was published in 1999. She branched out to more specific application training books, specifically for Adobe products which began in 2000 through 2006. She also co-founded the Flashforward Conferences and the Flash Film Festival in 1999 with United Digital Artists Productions, Inc. (UAD).

As her books became more popular, she created Lynda.com as a free resource to go with the lessons in the book. The site included video tutorials, articles and other materials to help web designers create efficient web graphics. Directed by Weinman and her husband Bruce Heavin, the site and the business soon grew to eclipse the books in terms of reach and breadth of computer design application training. What started as a couple of video lessons about how to make web graphics soon became the go-to-site for online training on the internet. The company was eventually acquired by LinkedIn in May 2015.

Weinman received the GirlGeeks Golden Horn Rims Award at Comdex in 2000 and was inducted into the Women in Technology Hall of Fame in 2011.

Lynda Weinman’s legacy in the field can be seen in the work of the thousands of interaction, visual, UI and web designers who work in the field today who learned their craft from her books and videos.

Lynda Weinman Bibliography