Dovla's Blog

Torn between worlds

2010-01-04T22:24:23Z

I never cared much for new year’s eve, this entire idea that there is a certain time and place in which you have to go all out and celebrate really pisses me off. So artificial and bloated and it doesn’t take into account how you might feel on that particular day. I’ve always had big issues in regards to where I would spend my new year’s eve and with whom. Since people always tend to get shitfaced beyond recognition I’d usually wind up either staying home or just hanging out with a few of my gamer friends. However this year I got lucky enough to get a killer gig In Gent. Apparently a lot of people in Belgium heard my set at Ozora and everyone loved it so much. I was really looking forward to playing some 4/4 set for a change. Even though music wise I am still listening to nu jazz and trip hop a lot more. Especially after the great gig in London.

Thank you London!

2009-12-08T22:21:34Z

Every year when the summer festival season ends things slow down to a crawl here. The few parties that do happen usually have the style of music that I no longer have a craving for. It's sad when the only reason why you go to a party is to socialize with people you don't really have tight friendships with. But there are always nice little exceptions that happen and make me remember the lovely summers I've been having these last couple of years. One of em was the Pitch Black party that happened about a month ago here. I've been wanting to write a proper review of it for a while now but just couldn't grab the time. I met up with a good friend before the party and started talking about how we just want to go out and dance to good music and not be bothered with facts like who's there or who isn't. We both got what we asked for...and then some. I loved their live so much that I bought two cds right afterwards.

Working on a daily basis

2009-10-18T11:48:55Z

So the day finally came that I'd get a proper day job. It got to a point where the only thing I was doing regularly was watching movies, playing videogames and listening to music all day long. Another bad case of insomnia soon followed so I'm very thankful to be an upstart in a really cool web development company called Neumatik.

Working together with a longtime friend of mine and his mates as well as being right next to a full blown music production studio is a dream. I can't imagine a better working place right now. Check out the company Neumatik.hr. The owner of the studio is a famous techno artist called Petar Dundov. Anyway the job is now keeping me pretty busy and letting me sleep and eat properly which is a really good thing. Things have been rather busy on the music front as well. After the successful Ozora festival gig I sparked a lot of interest and became part of a booking agency called Human Touch so in case you are interested in booking me please do so through them. Local gigs are still done by myself though.

What a blast!

2009-08-18T09:45:11Z

So the summer festival season is finally over for me. It’s been such an amazing experience again, I’ve met a lot of new people and had tons of fun spinning the music I love. The first festival I had the pleasure of going to was the Sonica Reloaded festival in Italy, maybe around 40 kilometers north from Rome. Around 3600 people gathered in a beautiful location in the Italian countryside. It was a bit dusty and the sun was really burning but the best thing about the location was the fact that it had a really cold stream flowing through it. So any time you wanted to, you could just lay down in the water and refresh yourself, something that’s really a big plus to have at such festivals.

Busy or lazy

2009-07-11T13:41:17Z

Tons of stuff going on at the moment, most important of all however is the fact that I finally graduated First I was busy finishing up the dissertation work, then I was busy sorting out everything else that was left behind and now I’m trying to get away from everything. So anyway my current title is apparently something along the lines of “Engineer of Computer aided Graphic Design”. Of course I’m not sure what the actual translation to English is. Heck I’m not even sure what the title is in Croatian, I guess I’ll find out once they issue the diplomas.

The trip down memory lane

2009-04-28T13:52:15Z

I went digging around my old basement with my mother recently, we found a lot of my first grade notebooks and although for her the value is in it's content I was more struck by the design of the notebooks themselves. Of course I didn't really give too much attention to them as a kid, although I remember them having a sort of Pokemon "gotta catch 'em all" feel. I also found the folder for art class papers but that one was way too big to scan. I would love to know who designed these at the time because I am still fascinated by the sheer simplicity and effectiveness this design has. If anyone has a clue drop me an email. The green one for drawings is definitely my favorite and I will probably scan its contents at some point. They have some of my first drawings which were also very funny to look at. I found tons of more interesting stuff but I don't have the energy to scan it all now.

I know who I am :)

2009-03-08T16:46:55Z

Mood swings aren’t a common thing with me, I’m usually pretty stable with both feet planted firmly on the ground. But since I’ve had so many chaotic episodes in the last couple of months I’ve been pretty on and off recently. And I knew that things would settle down as soon as the weather started getting nicer and I started spinning some music. The last two weeks have been very busy and I can finally say I’m out of the woods. The greatest feeling you can experience is being completely happy with who you are and what you’re doing. A feeling of complete control of one’s life and one’s actions. Not regretting anything that you’ve done or will do. Treating every experience and every situation you get into as an education, as a lesson you need to take to make you even smarter. Always being the critical bastard I am, analyzing everything I do into oblivion I expect nothing less of myself before entering another relationship.

The things I do for free

2009-02-27T15:11:26Z

Why are the things I do for free so much more frustrating to do than the ones I get paid for? It's a mystery I've been unable to solve for years. I've made websites for people who have paid me good money and they had every right to bitch about every single visual aspect of the site but instead they let me do my job and respected it. Conversely, when I do something for free people abuse it, they tend to make themselves the designer and put me in the form of a tool that they use to get what they want. I don't mind people saying that something I made isn't good, I've made tons and tons of stuff that's crap. But what do you expect when you're not paying me a single dime for it. In the last couple of weeks I've felt torn apart from everyone demanding something from me. Either it's help with a computer, or just some "small thing" that needs to be done in Photoshop

I’m now part of Interchill Records

2009-02-14T16:00:12Z

Some DJs might not find switching labels as such a big deal but it took me about two weeks to go through with the decision. But as of yesterday I am part of the Canadian based label Interchill Records. Sofa Beats has been my first and only label so far, I haven't done a whole lot apart from my own compilation and helping out with an album from Krusseldorf and some other EPs. But the fact that I come from a country that has a very small scene and that I still consider my DJing career to be very short I always thought highly of them for letting me be part of the team.

The chill gig that felt like a trance one

2009-02-08T15:33:44Z

I’ve had my share of bizarre situations during DJ sets but the one I had last night takes the cake. Usually when I play downbeat music there’s never a swarming crowd of people, it’s just the way it is with chill out floors on trance parties and festivals. In general they are always neglected and most people just come to dance. Even most friends you talk to that say they will come and listen to you usually don’t show up. It never bothered me really nor does it offend me, I just got used to it and I always prefer to play for a smaller audience. I’ve never felt the same kind of feedback in my trance sets that I get in my chill out sets. It’s that special moment that usually happens when there are 2-3 people during your set, you begin to wonder if it’s all worth it and then one of them walks up to you, asks for the name of the track you’re playing, or just says that he/she is enjoying it. In that moment you know that there’s no bullshit behind that comment. Their opinion of your set isn’t based on anything else but their taste in music whereas on trance it can be anything from alcohol, drugs or worse, the opinion that the current DJ playing is a god no matter what he does. I’m not saying the same thing doesn’t happen on chill out but it surely happens on a less frequent basis.

Chrono Trigger DS, and some other stuff

2009-01-14T11:57:48Z

When I was a kid my first console was the SNES and one of the things that was very limiting at the time was the fact that there was no store in my city where you could get games for it. Of course piracy didn't exist back then and the only option was having my dad pick up a game every month when he went to the Netherlands. Now being a kid who just got into the whole gaming thing I relied on his taste, which was surprisingly always spot on. Mind you games were very expensive at the time especially for our standards. It was about one game per month for me and every time when he came back it was filled with anticipation and expectation. My only touch with the entire gaming world was the official Nintendo magazine and naturally they were a pretty biased news source. We didn't have internet access at the time so I was pretty much kept in the blank about most things. Despite all of this I have maybe 2-3 SNES games that actually suck and many times he would go out and buy some game that he didn't know anything about. One particular game I like to remember was Illusion of Time (Illusion of Gaia in the US). This was one of those risky titles that he picked up and didn't really know what it was about, other than the fact that it was a hit. And it sure as hell was. Up until that point apart from the Zelda games I never played any other action RPGs and I like to come back to this particular game because of the compelling story it told.

On ems and why I gave up on them

2009-01-07T07:32:20Z

One of the things I found interesting when I started writing code for this website was the possibility of using em sizing instead of regular pixel sizing. I won't bother explaining what it is that ems are, instead just read this fine article on clagnut. When I realized that I could make my website (or any other website for that matter) scalable I was very excited. The problem nowadays is that when you increase text size in the browser the whole thing falls apart. So I used this cool method described on clagnut and started doing all widths and all heights in ems. It worked for a long time actually and I did manage to get most of my site to look the same in all browsers. I also had this cool idea to have a background image in the header that would be sized in pixels but have the header itself sized in ems so that when you'd increase the text size you would reveal more of the background image. I thought about hiding some text messages in these images and overall it worked. But three things occurred to me in the process.

Welcome to my new website!

2009-01-04T00:35:55Z

Hello everyone and welcome to my new website, this one I promise you is gonna stick around for a very very looong time. It's been almost 3 years since I first decided to start making a new website for myself, as with all my previous personal websites I chose to face another challenge and learn something along the way. I also decided to not limit myself creatively. The biggest problem was to make something that I would like after a longer period and something that I would actually get around to updating. Since I first started tinkering around with html and started making websites for people my biggest issue was developing a CMS that would simply work.

I'm not a programmer and never will be so finding something that would give me the flexibility I need and the simplicity of developing was the goal. And I'm very happy to say that I've found the ideal CMS that does just that, Expression Engine. I'm also excited and happy that this never ending nightmare of coding is over for me. I now have a website that I'm happy with, that I've been slowly developing for the last 2 years in between other projects. As I said this one is here to stay, I have no intention of making another project for myself anytime soon that's why I took extra care to make sure I really like this design, that I can always come back to it and that I can actually write a proper blog that people will find interesting to read as well as properly update all my sections.

A little bit about me

2008-12-27T17:23:56Z

Well what to say. It's been a busy life so far and I'm only 26. Living on my own in the capitol city of Croatia, Zagreb and making ends meet by doing design work, photography and DJing. A passionate gamer and music lover. I started this website because I wanted to put all my life's work into a proper form, not so much as an online portfolio, just a place where I can say, here's the bulk of it, this is my life. There are many clients and things I did in the previous years that aren't listed here and probably won't be. My goal is not to put as much content for bragging rights but rather sumarize my own life's work that I'm mostly proud of and happy with.