It was time to move on as i reached the decision to start my own journey and this time for real as i’m thinking of starting a one man studio of visual bliss. So the new website, portfolio etc. should be finished in the summer.

The current portfolio is outdated, for the new one (2009-2011) please email me. The one that features work before 2009 can be found at http://portfolio.darjanpanic.com

ILoveSketch from Seok-Hyung Bae on Vimeo.

As you see it is easier and a lot faster to create models this way, but the problem is, that you need drawing skills for this and if you don’t have them, your models would become a bit odd. Now the people who know how to draw should have it easy to create models. But will the others that don’t be left with no work? Illustrators draw characters on paper, 3D modelers make the models, so 2 people do this things and if we teach one of them the other skill or technique, one of them may get fired and the other one would do work for 2 but would get payed for only 1 person. That’s the problem with technology. But overall it is a amazing software.

Barcinski & Jeanjean

Nokia Music Almighty – All Styles, All Music, Almighty.

Hello Sour Sally!

Monster Lab

State of tomorrow

HUGO & MARIE – Creative Direction & Artist Management

Rubens Lp

Online portfolio of UK designer and illustrator Mike Harrison

Jose Ortiz – Motion designer

Epsonality

Since my laptop has a poor battery i had to use AC adapter and connect it to the camera. So i wasn’t able to change the landscape etc. Everything was shot from my window view but i think it’s ok for the first try. Learned a lot so next time i’ll be something amazing.

Cloudy weather timelapse from darjanpanic on Vimeo.

Main reason that i had to make a new design was, because the last site got hacked pretty hard and i lost all of my data. The backups were also broken so there are lots of posts with missing images in them and the previous theme was broken and bugged.

What will i be writing on my blog? There were quite some ideas but mostly it will be a web and graphic design oriented site with the help of photography (i’m went kinda deep into this). To add some extra to it it will have some sweet tutorials and guides so there isn’t a way of getting bored here.

So fasten your seatbelts and enjoy the ride…

But first let’s see, what wikipedia has to say about this. The word talent refers to, talent, as a intellectual giftedness, and a skill,which is the ability to perform a task well or better than average. Which is true, but still, we understand this word differently. Most of the time people use it as talent equals “i really like your work”.

Sometimes if a person is talented, people think, that he doesn’t have to work hard to achieve something good. Let it be creativity, design or sports, this is not true. For me being talented means a ability to let’s say learn some skills faster or maybe yet, taking less time to finish something or taking the same time as others, but making it better. To make good work, you need to put effort in it, being talent only helps, but doesn’t do the job for you.

There are also differences in being talented and being a hard working person. My personal opinion is that a hard working person, can beat a lazy talent whenever there’s time. But, you’ve got a problem if you’re competing to a hard working and talented person. To catch up to him, you’ll need to work twice the hard, or even more.

Let me tell you my own short story. I’ve been learning and doing web and graphic design for couple of years, when i started, i saw a lot of good designs, especially those amazing flash sites. And since i only knew the basics i really got depressed looking at those. It even got me thinking of quiting since i didn’t think i was able do such great things. Well the problem was i wasn’t that experienced at that time. But since i love what i do i started to feel more and more motivated and started working and learning hard.

A lot of people get depressed if they see talented people and their portfolios. After that, they think they’re not talented. If you don’t believe in yourself being talented, you should start believing in your work. You can always be a talent of hard work!

I personally use Thunderbird and have set-up some personal spam filters, that automatically delete some spam emails. The problem is, that sometimes it also deleted non-spam ones too. You just need to ban the worst keywords you find in those useless mails.

The problem isn’t when you get a new spam email to your inbox. The problem starts when a spammer gets a list of thousands of email addresses and starts to send crap to them. These lists are worth very much and can cost about $10.000 or even more.

There are some ways you need to know about, on how not to get on these kind of lists. Here are some:

• Don’t send those chain letters, forward or reply to them.

  If you look closely at them, there may be hundreds of emails in it. a good way for spammers to add new victims to their list.

• On your blogs or sites, don’t type in your email in text like my.name@email.com or even my.name [at] email.com. Spammers are clever and they developed their own crawlers/spideres who save and change this to a working email.

  One way is to use forms for this (there are a lot of good Wordpress plugins for this, or free script available on the internet) or write the email in a picture using Painter or some other software and then add it to your site.

• There are a lot of free services on the internet, where they say write your email and you’ll get free ringtones and similar stuff. Now why would you get free stuff for just a email? Because it’s added to a spam list and you’ll get daily spam emails again. A solution would be to have more than 1 email address where you keep one clean and the other one for services that don’t have a big name and aren’t trustworthy. As for big companies like Google, Yahoo, youtube etc. feel free to use your clean email since these sites won’t sell your email.

I get daily about 100 spam emails or more and i have quite some accounts too so cleaning these things up is taking me a lot of time. I even lost some clients because of spam

If anyone has any more info on good spam filters or spam blockers, feel free to add them to the comment

Let’s take for example McDonald’s. They spend more than billion of dollars per year on branding and advertising. I remember being a kid, and have come the first time to them. What i got was a FREE balloon and that paper cap. I know a lot of you had similar experience with this. This is the point where the brand starts to work. It’s even more powerful on a innocent child, but adults get to play the company’s game too.

If anyone watched Super Sized Me, you may have seen what McDonald’s does. What their brand is capable of. I remember when kinds were shown some pictures of famous people, after that point, the study has shown that these kids know, that Ronald McDonald, the clown, really knows what is good for them. So they trust him in full. Well who wouldn’t they got free balloons, caps, toys and other that stuff.

Today, this brand has got even powerful. Now kinds think, that if the food has that M logotype, it tastes better than everything else. Even vegetables taste better. So the brand tricks them into thinking or experiencing good or bad food.

Same stuff happens to Nike, Adidas etc. If it has a famous brand on it, it’s better. Is this true or not?

SunTimes calls this method brainwashing – and you can read a lot more stuff about this topic here.

At shop.wordpress.net there are Wordpress T-shirts in red (male and female models) available. I ordered sizes XL and 2XL since these are US sizes and i didn’t know which one will fit me. So one of them is either small or either very big… i haven’t tried them yet.

Here are some quick pics of the famous Wordpess T-shirt:

There are 2 reasons why i ordered a Wordpress t-shirt. The one is i really like WP and their FREE services and the most powerful blogging tool available. The second reason is, i want to support their hard work. Wordpress software and plugins are updated frequently and since the software is free, they don’t make any money out of it.

It’s just a small way to say thanks to the Wordpress team