Considering that our ancestors, Australopithecus, and even as late as archaic Homo, had larger canines than us and that the trend in canine size in our evolutionary chain has been reduction, I fail to see how this applies.
Please note that I'm not saying that we don't eat as much meat as we used to. The opposite is true; due to the availability of meat, we eat much more. However, we also don't eat raw meat. We figured out ways to cook or otherwise prepare our food so that we can use molars instead.
Why is this sad?
The.NET platform has its quirks, but Microsoft did a lot right. As a new developer, I found it extremely easy to learn because of its uniform implementation, extensive documentation, and large community. No, it's not the only platform that has this, but it certainly helps.
Now I can market those skills to a large base of employers and be confident that I can adapt to related technologies (WF, WPF, Silverlight) with ease.
Again, why is this sad?
If design is something that interests you and that you want to add to your bucket of skills, then get started. Fortunately, learning design is like learning your first programming language; once you learn that first language, the skills and techniques you learn can be transferred and implemented in many other languages. Good design skills and techniques can be applied to many many many other areas besides web sites. Gotta make a GUI for that crucial command line app? Why not do it using good design skills so that it makes sense to you - oh, and to the other poor saps that have to come along and inherit it after you move on. How you furnish your office, your home, what clothes you wear, even the meals you make - these things all have aspects of design in them.
As the Man With Many Hats at my small company, the boss asked me to do this too. In my case, my boss had a general idea what he wanted to do -- 'spruce up the site' -- but didn't really have any idea what that meant. The first thing I did was sit down and talk about it with him. I needed to figure out what his overall goals for the site were (keep the same content, just make the design prettier, make it easier to more frequently update, etc) before recommending anything. I really can't overemphasize how important it is to communicate. Hopefully along the way you can impart some of your knowledge about what the (re)design would entail - in non-technical, broad terms, of course.
This information will come in handy whether you end up doing it in-house or getting a pro to do it. Once you know what has to be done, you can give your boss the scoop. If he's a good businessman, he'll listen.
"Hey, Boss, it sounds like the goals you established will require a large investment in man hours. I'd be happy to do it. However, it sounds like it might make be more efficient to have the design done professionally so that we can be sure the goals are met."
But be sure to tell him that in order to get in touch with the much weaker hippie artistic side of your brain, you're going to need some extra supplies.
1) Smoke a few bowls.
2) Litter the corporate site with <blink> tags.
3) ??????
4) PROFIT!
Slashdot Mirror
Considering that our ancestors, Australopithecus, and even as late as archaic Homo, had larger canines than us and that the trend in canine size in our evolutionary chain has been reduction, I fail to see how this applies.
Please note that I'm not saying that we don't eat as much meat as we used to. The opposite is true; due to the availability of meat, we eat much more. However, we also don't eat raw meat. We figured out ways to cook or otherwise prepare our food so that we can use molars instead.
Why is this sad? The .NET platform has its quirks, but Microsoft did a lot right. As a new developer, I found it extremely easy to learn because of its uniform implementation, extensive documentation, and large community. No, it's not the only platform that has this, but it certainly helps.
Now I can market those skills to a large base of employers and be confident that I can adapt to related technologies (WF, WPF, Silverlight) with ease.
Again, why is this sad?
If design is something that interests you and that you want to add to your bucket of skills, then get started. Fortunately, learning design is like learning your first programming language; once you learn that first language, the skills and techniques you learn can be transferred and implemented in many other languages. Good design skills and techniques can be applied to many many many other areas besides web sites. Gotta make a GUI for that crucial command line app? Why not do it using good design skills so that it makes sense to you - oh, and to the other poor saps that have to come along and inherit it after you move on. How you furnish your office, your home, what clothes you wear, even the meals you make - these things all have aspects of design in them.
As the Man With Many Hats at my small company, the boss asked me to do this too. In my case, my boss had a general idea what he wanted to do -- 'spruce up the site' -- but didn't really have any idea what that meant. The first thing I did was sit down and talk about it with him. I needed to figure out what his overall goals for the site were (keep the same content, just make the design prettier, make it easier to more frequently update, etc) before recommending anything. I really can't overemphasize how important it is to communicate. Hopefully along the way you can impart some of your knowledge about what the (re)design would entail - in non-technical, broad terms, of course.
This information will come in handy whether you end up doing it in-house or getting a pro to do it. Once you know what has to be done, you can give your boss the scoop. If he's a good businessman, he'll listen.
"Hey, Boss, it sounds like the goals you established will require a large investment in man hours. I'd be happy to do it. However, it sounds like it might make be more efficient to have the design done professionally so that we can be sure the goals are met."
But be sure to tell him that in order to get in touch with the much weaker hippie artistic side of your brain, you're going to need some extra supplies.
1) Smoke a few bowls.2) Litter the corporate site with <blink> tags.
3) ??????
4) PROFIT!