Luke Wroblewski

I think there are many opportunities for 'consultancy' in this area. Design is not just about working in photoshop at your desk until 'it's done'.

A few examples:

1. Nathan Barry's latest photoshop course is akin to 'consultancy' in that he is providing an educational service to others. He is charging for access to this course which means it can continue bringing in revenue whilst he works on other projects.

2. Luke Wroblewski and Gabriel Svennerberg are both accomplished UX Designers who consult for companies. Much of their time is spent advising clients by asking questions rather than simply designing the answer.

3. Clarity.fm and AnyFu provide a consultancy marketplace for designers (amongst other professions)

[1] http://nathanbarry.com/photoshop/

[2] http://www.lukew.com/ http://www.svennerberg.com/

[3] https://clarity.fm/browse/search/design http://anyfu.com/

I like Luke Wroblewski's advice a lot (http://www.lukew.com/ plus his two books on form design and web usability)

I have to worry about form design mostly, so two links I liked were

http://www.uie.com/articles/web_forms/ and
http://www.uxmatters.com/mt/archives/2006/07/label-placement-in-forms.php

I also stole some ideas from here:
http://developer.fellowshipone.com/patterns/

Those are the ones I've read and somewhat followed.

I also bookmarked this framework to try out:
http://gantry-framework.org/

There are also several eyetracking services (some provided by Ycombinator companies I believe) - I'd love to have eyetracking studies on the company website, but the current management doesn't mind that it looks like crap since it will be outsourced anyways.

In my opinion, this is one of the most important features of CSS preprocessors. Wether you're doing rapid prototyping and working on the real deal, having a set of variables for colors, fonts and whatnot helps you a lot controlling the look and feel of your site and avoid mistakes that even Facebook did [1]

This is one of the main reasons why foundations like Twitter Bootstrap or Compass are awesome but unfortunately people are so lazy they don't even change the color variables in Bootrstrap, hence the "yet another Twitter Bootstrap" site.

[1] Facebook had 706 CSS files, they declared the Facebook blue color 261 times, used 548 unique hex values for colors, had 6498 declarations of color. http://www.lukew.com/ff/entry.asp?1379

> Isn't Foundation already responsive?

Yes.

> Don't most websites built with Foundation's grid system automatically fit nicely on mobile devices?

Yes, but responsive designs always means tradeoffs, and those tradeoffs will be different depending whether you're "desktop first" and scaling down or "mobile first" and scaling up. And of course, the framework can set a course on what to check and where to start from.

Luke Wroblewski is a big advocate of tackling responsive design from the bottom ("Mobile First"): http://www.lukew.com/ff/entry.asp?933 http://www.abookapart.com/products/mobile-first and he apparently pushed for Foundation 4 to much better support this design style.

Here's an actual eye tracking study that comes to the opposite result of the linked article:
http://www.lukew.com/ff/entry.asp?571

This isn't really surprising. The article claimed he just knew from experience and didn't need to do a test, so the whole article was just bullshit.

I was laughing out loud when he said users read all the options before picking one anyway, since I've seen that not happen in countless tests. Users don't generally give a crap about your interface, won't read instructions or screens fully, and will just scan and grab on to something that matches their current goal.

Yes, and it will radically change as the web stops being English / Latin alphabet dominated.

Typography for Japanese characters is fascinating - three different languages almost, sitting in the same sentence, the cadence of language reflecting in the angles or spacing,
the possibilities are an order of magnitude more complex than English - and an order of magnitude more rewarding.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/esthet/3454734/ - beauty in calligraphy

http://www.kfstudio.net/himaji/ - cute fontface for Kanji

http://www.lukew.com/ff/entry.asp?111 - a good primer