That said, I wish for a little more. Firstly, there seems to be no way to change the background image of themes with one of your own, although you can choose from a large set of predefined ones. Secondly, the Blogger navigation bar at the top of the pages is a big bother, cause, do as you may, you often can’t get it to mix and match properly with your custom theme. It is not that I feel ashamed of the fact that my blog is hosted on Blogger; it is just that I want a better Blogger tag, something like the Typekit tag on my blog (which I have included although I am not obliged to):

Some people turn off the Blogger nav-bar using CSS but I am not sure if that is okay with Google. If it is, then why not give users an easier option to turn it off.

Thirdly (although I have not tried this with the new Blogger-in-draft version), there seems to be no way you can upload your (large) custom images which you can reference in your custom CSS. Uploading your images to Picasa just squashes your images to some predefined sizes, which is too restrictive. When I logged into Picasa today, it refused to show me any of my images, so I couldn’t really verify if things have changed since, duh :( Maybe, you can work with this restriction if you are really good. Nevertheless it is certainly not designer friendly.

The book is from the Harvard Business Press, and their books are usually a par above the rest. Additionally, unlike many other business book that I have read, this one turned out to be a bit more pragmatic (and therefore more useful). The book, being a business management book, is, as I said, full of commonsense stuff, most of which you should already be aware of. Still, I found a few nuggets of wisdom in it. Here’s one:

Perhaps the best mechanism for coping with change, then, is anticipating it.

At the end of the chapters of most business books, you will always find a summary section. Probably your CXO can’t afford the time to read through even a hundred pages :). Now-a-days most technical books have also started including an end-of-the-chapter summary section. Don’t buy one that has one; the book is probably not well written.

If you are eager, and have enough spare time you should probably join a design school near you. Sadly, there are not many such schools here in India. The ones that are there look questionable (a quick look at their website designs will immediately tell you why :)). The best that you can do is get into NID.

Many people though don’t have the time or the money to go through a 3-4 year course in design. Some, like me, are probably too old to join a school (especially true here in India; the upper age limit for the post-graduate programme in NID is 27 years). The best option therefore, for aspiring fools like us, is to turn to books, and turn their pages in the dead of the night. Sadly again, books on graphic design are quite expensive. You also have to buy them online and get them imported into the country which adds to the costs. It is also unlikely that you will find a good stock of books on graphic design in any library here.

My suggestion is, do a fair bit of research, and figure out the best books that are out there. Save a bit of money and buy them. I am sure that if you have the passion, practice and patience, you can become a good designer. If you are looking for a list of books on design, I suggest you go through the list on Jason Santa Maria’s blog.

To be frank, we wouldn’t have known about their arrival even then, had they not tried contacting us through radio signals first. Of course, at first, we couldn’t understand each other. Plans for attack and counter-attack were being formulated and discussed across the globe and most things were in frenzy for a few days.

However, it took our best minds only a week to decipher the messages and reply back in the same language and format. Soon, we we exchanging images, and later audio and video, and it became apparent that these aliens were really humans, almost indistinguishable from us.

Not only that, it also turned out that their home planet was inhabited by nearly the same flora and fauna found on Earth. This was a surprise for most of us, however, most scientists had a difficult time coming to terms with it. How on Earth could we account for the innumerable number of coincidences that would have made this possible, they asked.

These men had been flying across the universe for several generations looking for a more habitable planet than their own dying one. Over these years they had adapted to the lifestyle on space. Obviously, they were more advanced than us in many respects, however, in many other aspects they were a few generations behind us.

A bigger coincidence than the one that our scientists were faced with, was that these men came just about when we ourselves had seriously begun looking for other habitable planets and the technology to take us there; the Earth had already become uninhabitable in large swathes near the equator. We were now relieved to find that space travel was now within our reach.

I book is around 600 pages, however, the last couple of hundred pages are about ‘putting it all together’, which you can skip if you are working on something real. Additionally, you can also skip the exercises at the end of the chapters if you have better things to do. The book contains a huge number of screen shots, and I guess that the actual number of pages would come down to about 150 if you take away these pics. Reading through the book is a breeze.

The book is well written. That said, it is a ‘very-wet-behind-the-ears’ beginner level book, which assumes that you have hardly written any code ever let alone built a web page of any complexity. It actually tries to teach you a bit of VB.NET programming along the way among other basic things. So you can actually skip-jump over many of the sections if you have been programming for a while.

Can’t really recommend this book to a seasoned programmer. If you at all have any experience programming, I suggest you go for the (appropriately titled) ‘Programming ASP.NET 3.5‘ book by the same authors. I actually bought both the books, however, the ‘learning’ one turned out to be somewhat redundant (though it doesn’t hurt reading a simpler take on a subject if you have time on your side).