For web developer David DeSandro, the start of the new year seemed like a good time to leave his cushy job at Twitter. As a product designer there, he developed myriad apps to enhance the Twitter experience for its end users. But DeSandro thinks more web products need to be geared toward other developers, rather than end consumers. Web developers need better tools to design for the web more easily.

David DeSandro Photo: Flickr user Lachlan Hardy

The market for these specialized front-end web development tools is hot. Famo.us, a San Francisco-based web design startup that creates visually rich web libraries for front-end web developers, raised $20 million in Series B funding last summer. And open-source development platforms, like Compass and Bootstrap, have thousands of users. All of these coding suites let front-end web developers use pre-written code to make their own design work easier.

DeSandro is adding his brand to the mix with his company Metafizzy. Started four years ago as a side project, Metafizzy is now DeSandro’s main gig. Like Famo.us, Metafizzy is focusing on creating libraries that tweak the way visual content appears on websites. But unlike Famo.us, Metafizzy has been generating revenue for the last few years, from selling corporate licenses.

It helps that DeSandro is already something of a celebrity in coding circles. A few years ago, developers across the web started to use a library of his called Masonry. The code made images reorganize themselves vertically on a page, but not totally align with one another.

“2011 was the year for Masonry. There were lots of visual-heavy sites popping up, like artistic Tumblrs and visual-bookmarking apps, like Pinterest,” DeSandro says.

A comment on a 2012 Co.Design article argued that DeSandro should get credit for the image-grid structure that defines Pinterest’s look. And the earliest versions of Vox.com used Masonry, as did The Verge.

Masonry was so ubiquitous that you could just look at a website and recognize the design as a “DeSandro.” A friend of DeSandro’s recognized Masonry on the pop singer Beyoncé’s Tumblr and tweeted it out to him.