Before I start, I’m sorry to any experienced designers and developers who have read these dozens and dozens of times before. Sadly, the laymen still continually make these mistakes so every couple months beginner bloggers like me have to reinforce these issues.

For the past couple weeks I’ve been hunting for freelance jobs in the Chicago area on Craigslist. I’ve slowly learned that this is the worst place to look for work. There’s a bonus freebie. After going through a couple hundred listings, I’ve noticed the same reoccurring trends that have started to make me cringe and not even bother replying. If you have or are thinking about making a job posting on Craigslist or any other service, please avoid listing any of the following.

“I need someone who can do EVERYTHING!!!”

As much as I hate to admit it, no one can design you a logo, design and code you a website, incorporate some e-commerce, make it #1 in every search engine, and also be a systems administrator who is an expert in Flash and Final Cut Pro and is a Social Media Ninja with strong graphic design skills. They did start design firms and ad agencies for a reason. I find it perfectly acceptable to seek someone who can do frontend work as well as backend work, but there are limitations.

“I want it fast and cheap.”

Fine, but you’ve already picked your two. This kind of thinking is so old and common there’s even a Wikipedia entry on the classic “Project Triangle”. In other words you have three options:

• Design something quickly and to a high standard, but then it will not be cheap.
• Design something quickly and cheaply, but it will not be of high quality.
• Design something with high quality and cheaply, but it will take a long time.

If you need to think about this outside of web design, think about what happens when you build a house in a day with just cardboard. Cheap, right?

“I’d like a sample of your work to compare against someone else before I hire you.”

TOTALLY UNDERSTANDABLE! I’m happy to show you my portfolio and even projects that are nearing their completion that haven’t made it to my portfolio. Wait, you want me to “enhance a photo” or give you all of my ideas before I start? Well if that’s the case why did I spend all that time revising my resume and putting together my portfolio in the first place? Ah, you want it cheap, fast, and good. Doesn’t work like that (see above).

You don’t hire someone for a job, see how they do, and then decide whether or not to pay them. In reality your hiring thought process should be more along the lines of, “hey this person has done quality work in the past and I can see that. I expect them to do the same, if not better, work for me,”

Time Expectations

It’s a fact of life that deadlines need to be met. But! If you think you’re going to post something on Craigslist and get it done in a day or a week, then it’ll probably take a week or month, respectively. (Unless you don’t require high quality, see above)

What’s even worse than putting a designer or developer under the gun, is “knowing” how long it will take them to complete a project. The posts usually read, “I’m a programmer so I know how long it takes to design” or vice versa. Newsflash: your math savvy applicant is going to adjust their hourly rate to accommodate the amount of hours you think it’ll take to “get the job done”.

Job vs. Internship vs. Volunteer Position

The economy sucks. Fine. I can’t afford someone who is experienced. Fine. I want someone to work for me for free. Not fine. Seriously, it’s illegal and insulting. I could go on and on with phrases people use to say, “I don’t have any money to pay you now, but there will be TONS of future work”, but I think my favorite from today is:

Please don’t respond if you aren’t willing to start on internship basis, we’d be offering $ now if we could.(link)

First, there are such things as paid internships. (I’ve had a few) Second, if you’re starting a business why would depend on complete strangers to help you succeed? Friends, family, and fools. Ok, there are a lot of fools on Craigslist.

Bottom line, don’t call something a “job” or say that you’re “hiring” if there isn’t any compensation. Let people come to you if they want to work for free, don’t go out phishing for them. Internships are meant to be valuable experiences so individuals can go on and perform at a higher level at their next positions, not for young college and high school kids to be taken advantage of. If you aren’t offering a cup of coffee or a couple bucks an hour, then you’re just offering a volunteer position.

Every designer and developer understands that not everyone understands how much time and effort goes into their work so for every layman out there – please don’t underestimate us! Our work is valuable, specialized, and, for some, a livelihood. Thank you for not making yourselves sound like oblivious morons in your job postings!

What I Found

AJ Vaynerchuk's Blog Header

Here’s the HTML for his center image from DailyBooth.com:

<div id="polaroids">
<a href="http://dailybooth.com/ajv">
<img style="margin-left:14px; margin-top:15px; position:absolute; width:275px; border: none;" src="http://dailybooth.com/ajv/latest/large.jpg">
</a>
</div>

Very straightforward- a simple DIV with the “What I Look Like Today” polaroid as a background image CSS, a link to his DailyBooth account, and an image from DailyBooth.com that, as you can gather from the URL, is his latest upload.

The strange part is that I haven’t found any sort of documentation about this feature anywhere. It’s not mentioned in DailyBooth’s blog, FAQ, or listed as an option under their “Share” tab for a user. The closest thing I found was a blog post of theirs that explains “How to create a dailybooth screen saver” for Mac OS X using an undocumented RSS feed.

How You Can Use It

I’ll cover the simple stuff first which is hot linking to your latest picture on DailyBooth. I’m only encouraging hot linking because they say in their FAQ that it’s ok to hot link to DailyBooth icons that don’t yet exist (at least for me) on the share tab. There are three different sizes (small, medium, and large) to choose from (all somewhat odd dimensions if you ask me):

117 x 94 pixels

233 x 186 pixels

450 x 360 pixels

The URL structure is pretty easy to guess if you looked at AJ’s code: http://dailybooth.com/<username>/latest/<size>.jpg where <username> is your username like ‘maxbeatty’ and <size> is either ‘small’, ‘medium’, or ‘large’.

I love how AJ displays his picture prominently with the custom background, but I don’t like that he uses inline CSS styles to “shrink” the picture from DailyBooth. Here’s how you could style the large image with just CSS using the following HTML markup:

<div style="width: 460px">
<a href="http://dailybooth.com/maxbeatty/latest/large.jpg">
<img title="450 x 360 pixels" src="http://dailybooth.com/maxbeatty/latest/large.jpg" alt="450 x 360 pixels" width="450" height="360" />
</a>
<p>450 x 360 pixels</p>
</div>

Here’s the CSS I use on my site to “frame” pictures:

.wp-caption {
	border: 1px solid #ddd;
	text-align: center;
	background-color: #f3f3f3;
	padding-top: 4px;
	margin: 10px;
	-moz-border-radius: 3px;
	-khtml-border-radius: 3px;
	-webkit-border-radius: 3px;
	border-radius: 3px;
}

.wp-caption img {
	margin: 0;
	padding: 0;
	border: 0 none;
}

.wp-caption p.wp-caption-text {
	font-size: 11px;
	line-height: 17px;
	padding: 0 4px 5px;
	margin: 0;
}

You could also take AJ’s route of using a CSS background image. I’m guessing that DailyBooth plans to release some of their own “frames” to let you share your latest photo based on this FAQ entry. Until then you can use this undocumented direct URL to your latest image. Maybe in the future DailyBooth will allow you to also pull the caption from your photo and include how many responses you’ve had to it. Right now, you could parse a user’s RSS feed to grab the photo and description. If anyone is interested, leave a comment and I’ll whip up the PHP for it.

With Vaynermedia announcing their involvement in financing DailyBooth and then AJ being one of the first to use the feature on his own site, I almost wonder if they wanted someone to uncover this little easter egg before they made a formal announcement about a traditional badge that every other social site offers. I’ll be interested to see what they officially release as far as “badges” in the coming weeks.