Caltrops - Rants - I love talking about me.

Forum Overview :: Rants

by Fussbett 05/21/2005, 4:46am PDT

Chemdem wrote:

seducing hot underage cosplayers

The rest of your post was amusing, but here I think you're confusing me with someone else. Not that I poo-poo the notion, but I just haven't done it (yet).

But really, who is better suited to run a forum based graphic design business than a veteran freelance graphic artist that is a perpetual forum denizen.

I hear you, but at this point designoutpost.com has mindshare and traffic, two things Fussbett's Design Patio would have to earn, and I'm no internet traffic marketing person. Besides, I'm actually fine with the death of my graphic design career. In fact, I'm holding the pillow to its face while it's still got a pulse.

But we should totally think up more website ideas for me. I told conflictNo and ToutSuite that I was going to make a site for writing up all my various graphic work stories. I foresaw a website that would be a hub for cynical jaded designers and we'd post angry messages (ON A FORUM!!!) about jobs we were doing and swap stories. I'd be the star, of course, with featured articles talking about my life and such -- but I'd ask other people to contribute stories too, as the site built up steam. I was excited, but then after writing some beginning material, I went back and read it. In an attempt to write-what-you-know, I ended up with totally boring navel gazing. Unless you're me, in which case it's funny and insightful. I'm probably not as interesting to other people as I am to myself.

Here's a sample of my early years:

Fussbett foolishly wrote:

Multimedia Designer was what my first business card read in the mid 90’s. I designed multimedia, which is two or more medias put together. Not content to master a single media (psh, the renaissance), us multimedia designers tackled pictures AND sound. At the same time. That may seem impossible, but remember, we had the help of computers.

Designing multimedia, taken literally, would be a fantastic job to have, sitting there all day with a digital protractor and virtual T-square, just dreaming up visuals and sounds. "Yellow Garamond Condensed text… Light ambient techno music in the background!" is what you might hear a designer shout into the air before he collapses in a creative heap. Unfortunately, this is usually the role of the art director. The dirty secret behind being a multimedia designer is that you don’t often design, and instead spend your day implementing. Implementing, troubleshooting, fixing. I'm sorry if I just turned your whole world upside down with that statement. To keep you from going completely crazy, please be assured that the art director is almost always flamingly gay, just as you'd expect.

Exploding all around us in the 90s was the dot com boom, but while Indian in the Cupboard’s Rishi Bhat was developing million dollar privacy software and computer-savvy young people everywhere had their sights set on the bigger picture, I was at a multimedia company, focused on the small picture. Usually the small picture of an envelope with the @ symbol superimposed, an icon that would surely get the client approval once I add the drop shadow. My Ferrari would be earned the hard way.