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   CJ Bellwether (siege@octodon.social)'s status on Wednesday, 13-Sep-2023 12:33:04 JST CJ Bellwether

   Ah the halcyon days of being the "permanently on call" "in house but actually at home" designer for a bunch of very creative but very unorganized wonderful people running a runaway success theatre show brand where the producers would randomly send me messages at 2pm on a saturday like "hey we need a new full page treatment advert for the Metro paper going out tomorrow and we need it in 4 hours can you do that?"

   and id have to be like oh yeah sure no probs, i did just drop acid 15 minutes ago but it sounds like a fun activity!

   Ended up happening 3 times, to the point i started building techniques to do corporate design while tripping. Like looking away from the screen and then looking back quickly in order to make sure the colour is actually what your eyes were saying they were a second ago or to just stop things from being all wiggly for a second or two.

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     CJ Bellwether (siege@octodon.social)'s status on Wednesday, 13-Sep-2023 12:41:24 JST CJ Bellwether

     in reply to

     the funniest part to me was that each of the times i was on acid, it was always for a design that at the time was going to be the most viewed design id ever done in terms of amount of people who would be picking up a newspaper the following day and looking at it. And each time somehow the importance and prestige of the newspaper increased.

     To be clear I would never knowingly take drugs before designing professional work. The situation was always that they had either just negotiated a last minute advert space, or had forgotten to ask me to make an advert / poster and it was either i did the work while tripping or they missed the advert slot so i always felt the professional thing was to fulfill the contract even if i was somewhat in a magical space at the time.

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     CJ Bellwether (siege@octodon.social)'s status on Wednesday, 13-Sep-2023 13:05:30 JST CJ Bellwether

     in reply to

     I do also just fondly remember the times where i wasnt high and instead just got turned to as a last resort like once on a train home and got a call saying hey our designer has bailed on us and we need a poster for this big party in this big club venue in the next 5 hours and being like.. ok well i have 45 mins before i get home and i wont have enough time to change designs once i start, so heres what im going to design ... sound ok?, and them going yeah sounds fine, can you add some extra fun stuff to it too? Yeah sure what about i add some cartoon jungle animals poking their heads in around the edges and they can all be wearing sunglasses or fun hats? ok yeah thatll do. ok cool.

     And then just sitting down into a state of ultimate flow and being like i dont have time to second guess anything, this is the design, it will just have to look amazing, keep going keep going, this red ruffed lemur is going to be wearing ultra femme glam sparkly sunglasses and sticking its tongue out no time to consider its just happening, you sir, mr giraffe, have a cowboy hat.

     ultimate ADHD design levels.

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     CJ Bellwether (siege@octodon.social)'s status on Wednesday, 13-Sep-2023 21:03:33 JST CJ Bellwether

     in reply to

     • new improved hazel

     @hazel that pretty much is my existence right now

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     new improved hazel (hazel@godforsaken.website)'s status on Wednesday, 13-Sep-2023 21:03:34 JST new improved hazel

     in reply to

     @siege i love your anecdotes, feels like we're all sitting round a campfire after the end of the world and you're recounting these absurd stories from your life

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     CJ Bellwether (siege@octodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 14-Sep-2023 01:07:21 JST CJ Bellwether

     in reply to

     to back up my long windin stories, heres some posters i did before all my clients basically went bust over the pandemic - this is all ive got on my laptop here at the moment.

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     CJ Bellwether (siege@octodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 14-Sep-2023 01:27:24 JST CJ Bellwether

     in reply to

     but my main design work i love doing is prop forgery, so making items for grand immersive world theatre shows that people might pick up or be given like a passport, work chit, signs on walls, labels for products in the world with their own brands - so like a 1984 type immersive Alice's Adventures Underground where the unspoken design idea was that Alice had imagined this world a long time back and it had kept existing afterwards so getting to play with the question of how are they figuring out food sources as a society, like which of the fancy characters got to be society and which were decided to be live stock etc and having freereign to just put in fun allusions to that in all the items people pick up and look at, as well as constant jokes and fun easter eggs like a workroom pinboard covered in complaints, attempts to unionize and an advert for an Ovoids Anonymous meeting run by Mr H Dumpty

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     CJ Bellwether (siege@octodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 14-Sep-2023 01:38:25 JST CJ Bellwether

     in reply to

     🖼

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     CJ Bellwether (siege@octodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 14-Sep-2023 02:20:31 JST CJ Bellwether

     in reply to

     oh theres the rushed "fun animal poster". Not the best and a ton of things id do differently or add today, but hey, it got made and sent off in various print formats and sizes in 4 hours with minutes to spare, without any notice

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     CJ Bellwether (siege@octodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 14-Sep-2023 02:24:21 JST CJ Bellwether

     in reply to

     • Doc Impossible

     @Impossible_PhD thank you, i like to makea the pictures.

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     Doc Impossible (impossible_phd@hachyderm.io)'s status on Thursday, 14-Sep-2023 02:24:23 JST Doc Impossible

     in reply to

     @siege Damn, CJ, your work kills!

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     Sleepy time tea bear (sleepytimeteabear@octodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 14-Sep-2023 03:25:06 JST Sleepy time tea bear

     in reply to

     @siege you have the precious thing in design that can’t be taught: a sense of humour

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     CJ Bellwether (siege@octodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 14-Sep-2023 04:16:52 JST CJ Bellwether

     in reply to

     • Sleepy time tea bear

     @Sleepytimeteabear aww thank you :D yeah just getting told hey can you just run wild and make 50 food brands, heres some ideas but other than that just keep going on the theme, and inserting as many things as i can to make myself smile

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     Zoonie 🇪🇺 (zoonie@octodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 14-Sep-2023 05:01:26 JST Zoonie 🇪🇺

     in reply to

     @siege love the calligraphy flavoured ones. Reminds me of when Seb Lester does interesting work, only more atmospheric.
     I s'pose they are the design property of the theatre company? They'd look great on a wall :)

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     Zoonie 🇪🇺 (zoonie@octodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 14-Sep-2023 05:05:12 JST Zoonie 🇪🇺

     in reply to

     @siege very groovy also. You're rather good at this stuff, aintcha. Glad you get paid properly & are obviously recognised for doing good work.

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     CJ Bellwether (siege@octodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 14-Sep-2023 05:36:29 JST CJ Bellwether

     in reply to

     • Zoonie 🇪🇺

     @Zoonie no, none of it was done through official contract that signed away my rights for hire etc, just how much do you charge ok cool, so technically i kept copyright ownership of everything but it would burn bridges if i suddenly was like hey you cant use that design anymore unless you want to pay me etc. So like all the prop design stuff the guy who works with me closely and will likely use me again will sometimes be like "hey can you send me over all the stuff for X show" and ill just send it without trying to argue for a fee. Better to leave it a grey area and keep the network. The only time it was a problem was when one very corporate theatre company wanted me to remake some prop designs for merchandise and they hadnt realised they didnt own the design as they didnt have me under contract so we had to renegotiate a deal where they did *not* want me to get a percentage on sales.

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     doop (doop@octodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 14-Sep-2023 06:10:05 JST doop

     in reply to

     @siege these are all AWESOME, even more so with the backstory!

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     Zoonie 🇪🇺 (zoonie@octodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 14-Sep-2023 17:09:57 JST Zoonie 🇪🇺

     in reply to

     @siege that sounds frustratingly familiar as a scenario to... just about every creative freelance designer I know.
     I was thinking whether there is an instant poster printer online (a La t-shirt printers), there must be - so your designs could make you a very small but at least *something* amount of £. As I say, I am a total sucker for that glorious steampunky 'extreme lettering' type design, and the words were also rather wonderful :)