NEW Adress
Dear visitors,
I have moved the Atraktor studio blog and portfolio to a new adress:
Treecity
This piece is one of my favorite illustrations. It has been developed for a long period of time, bit by bit, and it seems like it is never completed. Maybe I will leave it like this, possibly I will do a vector version when I have the time.
Cohabitation of man and nature in the space-village
War of the Machines
Since I was overwhelmed with a lot of design work recently, I had to find a way to let out the steam and ease the pressure on my pulsing brain. The best way I found so far is sketching by hand. Sometimes with a pen, sometimes with a marker, but usually in black and white, or just a couple of colors. This is really a kind of an art therapy – when I get sick of coding, aligning, clean corporate designs, I turn to my dirty sketches. some of them end up being vectorized for further application: t-shirts, posters, small prints etc. and some stay just as they are. I scan them, do a little or no adjusting at all and that’s it.
The piece presented here is one of the most recent vectorized sketches. It is inspired by long lasting obssesion with the ‘Space Village Concept’. Robots and other machine-like creatures in the middle of a battle.
Ski Cross – Kopaonik 2008
This is the key visual element – a poster for the Ski-Cross that is about to take place on mountain Kopaonik in Serbia this winter. I have also designed the logo for the competition with couple of things in mind: speed, adrenalin rush, grungy style that resembles snow cracks and playful expressions to catch the viewers attention
Ski-cross is a very interesting alpine skiing discipline – four or six skiers race down the bumpy slope full of obstacles, jumps and dangerous curves at the same time. Helmets are obligatory.
Key visual for a Ski-cross competition that will take place in December on a mountain Kopaonik in Serbia
Beck’s beer – music magazine ads
It seems that a lot of my work is inevitably connected to beer. Once again I had a task of connecting the beer brand with music – this time for it was a series of ads and vignettes for a lifestyle magazine. The brief was to brand the magazine’s music pages with a couple of rather simple vignettes and two full-page and half-page ads, visually connect Beck’s beer and different music styles and genres.
Main idea was that each of the vignettes would represent different genre, so that the appropriate picture would be connected with the topic of the article on the page. It involved more work from my side, but made the branding look much more natural and unforced.
CD Cover Design for a Band- Music Graphics
I made this CD cover for my band called Duboka Ilegala. The inspiration for this piece was electro – folk music, connection the two terms in a visually appealing yet a bit funny way. You can download some of the songs or even order a full album by clicking this link: Duboka Ilegala Music.
Stari Grad Ski Club – Designing for the Skiers Yet Again
Once more I was involved into creating a logo, apparel applications and other various print work for a ski club based in Belgrade, Serbia. It wasn’t easy to get out of the cliche and not put a skier silhouette or a snowflake in the logo, but I think the effort finally paid off.
Visit the ski club’s website.
Snowflake Freeride ski team – extreme sports design
One of the things I love most is skiing. So, since I am one of the founders of the team, creating a visual identity for it was kinda natural.
The first pic is the member card design with the logo:
The second design is just a couple of days old. It is an application for T-shirts we will be creating soon.
More ski and snowboard designs still to come! Stay tuned.
Creating a Logo for a Multimedia Company
Although the process of creating a visual identity for a company is different every time, I will try to explain the basic ideas and key points and get you behind the scene by using this example. The brief for a logo was very clear and simple – a startup multimedia company needed a clean graphic identity that will represent and determine the new brand.
As always, I took my pencil and started sketching. Doodles and sketches are a very important part of the workflow. I sketch everything that comes to my mind and try to brainstorm many images, words and phrases. For me, it is very important that in the beginning I have a wide range of opportunities to choose from. At this point, every detail is important, anything can trigger a good logo idea. I was also a bit lucky with this one, as it has a very inspiring name: Image Spice (the client suggested that it can be both two words or just one).
After some initial sketches, I figured out three approaches. Every proposition emphasized a different characteristic, although they all had a similar ’spicy taste’.
I have given short “nicknames” to the propositions, so that we can communicate in a more efficient manner)
1) DOTS – in this concept I tried to put the words ‘image’ and ’spice’ in the same picture, with more-less direct, ‘in your face’ approach. Still, I tried to keep it a little abstract, so it can take you further in terms of imagination – little dots spice up the image, but without them the image itself wouldn’t exist. I think it would look very interesting applied to various print and screen materials (business cards, memos, animation….)
2) EYE – is a more ‘classic’ and less abstract approach, in which the association for ‘image’ is the eye, spiced with warm, even hot colors, making the image resembling the sun (life, light etc.) The circle of the eye is somewhat free structure, a drawing, but the colors inside are stacked in a proper order.
3) SCREEN – this one came out quickly, from something very different I tried to make. I just had to finish it 
It is more of a small story – a man standing in front of the colored screen, which can also be interpreted as a window, or an image. I especially like the structure of this one – 4 elements make a pretty strong whole, and there is good use of negative space which makes the eye float from the screen, on to the man, and then to the type. When you look at man’s legs, you also see an ‘I’, and consequently the company name.
After sending the first ‘polished’ propositions it is all more-less quite easy. I just wait for a response from a client, consult about the pros and cons of every idea and finally – work on the details and make a style guide.
I usually make a style guide for every logo I make, because it is necessary that the client gets familiar with all the applications possible and gets to know his own know identity in a good manner. I will write about creating a style guide (or a book of graphic standards) in a new post soon.
For now, here are just some of the pages showing the first page, full color logo, color and font definitions and three dimensional model.
Niksicko Beer – Branding the Snowboard Park
Yet more beer! This series of poster sketches wasn’t actually meant to be a series. Through a lenghty process of brainstorming, making, rejecting and refining the ideas, These three posters were the ones I think deserve to be presented.
The first one:
Needless to say it was rejected. No comment was made whatsoever.
Second attempt was more ’serious’:
Closer. But not there yet. So, I made the third one (all of the attached pics are actually low-res sketches, so the quality of the pictures is not too good sometimes):
Bingo! The third one was the lucky winner! I like it because it has that dinamic ‘in your face’ look and feel (I admit I imagined myself swimming in the beer, too), although the first one is still closest to my heart. I think I will make a copy for my room.
(*Then he goes away crying and complaining how clients are so cruel and insensitive. )
