After vowing not to look for freelance work on Craig's List, I thought I would just give it a browse after several weeks of ignoring it. Now, let me say, I know there are some serious businesses that advertise for permanent positions on Craig's List, and do offer great jobs with good pay. But in between these more lucrative full-time listings are a lot of ads for freelance jobs which are almost downright insulting to the profession of arts and graphic design.

Take this for example:

Looking for an artistic individual to create one small, black and white, sketch in the genre of a graphic novel. The sketch needs to be of a lawyer or law-related subject matter. It will be used on fliers and in small advertisements.

The artist is encouraged to incorporate his or her own ideas to create the sketch, but also needs to keep in mind that the sketch is intended for professional advertising. I may be wrong, but I am expecting that this should only take an hour or two for a talented individual to complete.

Compensation: Flat-rate around $35 - negotiable.

Wow, $35.00 for something that any professional illustrator knows is a pain-in-the -butt job just fraught with "that's not exactly what I had in mind," type of criticisms. The person or person(s) who placed this job have no idea of what it takes to create such an illustration, and more important, deliver it in a proper technical format. I especially love it when they determine how much time they think it will take to create. I can bet you any money that this is a payment only on successful delivery type of job as well, meaning that if they don't like what you've done in that "hour or two," you'll get nothing. If they do buy it, they are expecting to buy all rights to the image and use it ad infinitum. They probably will even want to keep the original artwork. What a steal.

The sad thing is, someone will bite and agree to do this job. They will end up spending a couple of days trying to satisfy this job, and since the pay is "negotiable," perhaps talk the guy into an extra 5 or 10 bucks, and then sell all rights to the artwork at no extra cost. Pathetic.

Previous: You Get What You Pay For

As a website developer, I am always looking for new clients, and recently I decided to start combing Craig's List. At first, I thought I had found this great resource and I would be able to locate new clients without having to advertise, cold-call or be referred by an existing client.

In the end, that does not seem to be. For contract developers not seeking full time employment, Craig's List is a vast wasteland of cheapskates and people who want the world for nothing. I have answered hundreds of postings, even offering my services at cut rates which I would never normally charge, and I still end up losing out to some high school hack designer with no experience because they'll offer to do it for almost no pay.

Or there are the people who have an exxagerated sense of self-importance. Take for example, the guy who offered $1000 for a fairly complicated and large website that he could update himself. It was the type of job I would usually do for around $2500-$3000. He loved my portfolio, I agreed to his price, I gave him a lot of technical knowledge about how this website could be built for that price and still be updatable, etc. and we were in final stages of closing the deal. He then informed me that it was between me and two other people - that's usually par for the course, mind you, so I wasn't surprised by that. Then he asked all three of us to do a mock-up of the home page so he could see what we might do with it. I told him no, that if he wanted to see what I would do he could look at my portfolio, and if that wasn't sufficient, good luck with his project and have a nice day. I had been burned before by spending hours on a mock-up and not getting the job, so I wasn't about to again - at least not for a measly $1000 job that would take many hours to complete beyond the price he wanted to pay. He said he understood, then continued to try to shoplift my ideas on building the site after we had already decided I wasn't going to do the job.

It doesn't help that there are always people who will do the job for whatever someone will pay. But you get what you pay for, and I have seen a lot of postings and talked to a lot of people who have said that they have been burned by flaky designers they found on Craig's List. Well, if they went with the lowest price instead of the most skilled designer with the best portfolio and references, they got what they paid for.

In the end, I have decided to stick with what has worked for me for the last ten years, which is word of mouth references based on my current clients satisfaction. There are more no-talent web jockeys or programmers who think they are designers because they can use Photoshop than ever before, so the web development industry is getting crowded. That's why I will continue to get my jobs from current clients reccomendations, and will stop wasting time on Craig's List competing with the unwashed masses.