Painful lessons in how not to produce a deductive logical argument
1. You know about computers.
2. Photoshop is a software package that runs on a computer.
3. Therefore, you know about Photoshop.
4. Therefore, you should spend the next five hours helping me with Photoshop for no pay.
5. What? But I thought you know about computers.
I’m an art-school dropout (I’m not kidding about that) who spends most of his day thinking in a totally abstract, non-visual manner. I still do CSS and HTML though, and can just about handle colour matching. I’ve even done some fancy sIFR stuff on a client site. Recently I changed domain name providers to avoid having to look at horrific GoDaddy lack-of-design. I read A List Apart, cruise the CSS Zen Garden and enjoy Make The Logo Bigger jokes.
But I’m not a designer. Just because I appreciate design and can knock some reasonable-looking CSS together doesn’t mean that I’m a designer. And I’m distressed that people can draw an inferential line from my ability to do stuff in Unix or Rails or XML or whatever to thinking that I can therefore do just about anything in any application ever, even if it requires creative skills that are outside my area of expertise. I guess, there are two ways of looking at it: the first is to take advantage of it and bilk stupid people out of their money for consulting fees, or I could do what I do best, figure out how to say “no” in the most polite way I can and take to heart that I’m not a designer, nor do I want to be. Because what I do now is much more fun.
