Rosters that survived the tab close.

A game studio whose entire hiring strategy was one person saying “wait, I know a guy.”

A two-person animation shop that re-discovered the same freelancer four separate times, each time delighted.

A brand agency running client pitches from fifty open tabs and one prayer that Chrome would not restart.

A print collective where thirty members each maintained a private list, and three of them emailed the same collector on the same morning.

An ad agency that budgeted for illustration and spent the budget on looking for illustrators.

A board game publisher whose art pipeline lived in a Slack channel called #art-maybe.

Two developers who screenshotted portfolios instead of saving them, then screenshotted the screenshots.

A picture book publisher that kept its illustrator shortlist in an email thread with itself.

A horror comics imprint that lost a colourist to a phone upgrade.

An architecture firm that hired the same visualiser twice at two different rates, three months apart.

A VFX studio where the only person who knew the freelancer list went on holiday.

A food brand that briefed an illustrator, then briefed a different illustrator with the same brief, having lost the first.

A record label whose album art shortlist was thirty Instagram saves and no usernames.

A museum that spent six weeks searching for an artist already in its own exhibition archive.

An apparel brand that described an artist to three people as “you know, the wave guy.”

An RPG publisher whose artist notes were written on the back of a printed map.

A series art department that maintained twelve personal lists and one shared belief that someone else was tracking it.

A motion collective that quoted a client before checking whether anyone was available.

A magazine art director who commissioned by whoever replied fastest, which is a strategy in the way that flipping a coin is a strategy.

A design studio that finally organised its artist list, then never opened it again.