Buy into my headline and you'll be The Greatest...

...Sucker of all time.

NO, NOT YOU. But you know what I mean.

I woke up to grey skies on Tuesday morning and saw the headline on one of the numerous design/IT magazines I subscribe to. I know they have to sell titles in the newstands and grab the publics attention, so they put BUY ME NOW lines on the magazine covers, and this one was something like "Give up the Day job" with the promise of easy riches and bumming around on the beach by becoming a freelance web designer. Whatever.

<-- This isn't the mag BTW, I just knocked it up for fun

It still makes me laugh - I've seen plenty of headline-grabbers and titles like "Create Professional Logos in just minutes", "become a coding guru" and "you too can churn out designs like this" and it makes me wonder where this leads us all.

OK, so products don't sell on promises of doom (apart from all the gas masks they sold after the UK Government's '45 minute' statement regarding Saddam's WMD (page 4 para 1)) and we're probably all guilty of selling stuff and selling ourselves (we're all hypocrites, it's whether we admit it and the degree of our hypocrisy) but shouldn't we all just be a bit more honest?

I get emails once in a while from people asking for work experience, jobs etc. This guy writes to me the other day that he's setting up a web design company though he has no portfolio, no experience and asks are there any pointers?

So I respond with some brief detail about his business plan, the status of his business, his projections and forecasts, registration with the tax man, keeping his accounts etc. etc. and that I hope this is all in order before we get to the fun of designing. Needless to say he hasn't come back, poor guy.

So, to the point of where does this lead us...

The popular press build it all up, everything is easy, you can have it all...
...then realists like me bring people back down to earth with a bump.

That's what grey skies do to a man ;)