Welcome to my digital playground
The name’s Stanko Beronja, and I live for design, creation, and being fully immersed in that relentless creative torrent. I was fortunate enough to transform my obsession into a bona fide career, and even after two decades of hustling in this electrifying realm, I still get that delicious rush from creating purely for the thrill of it. Prowling those city streets with my camera, hunting those brief flashes of raw beauty and immortalizing that fleeting second of aesthetic euphoria – that’s my kind of pursuit. Around 10 PM, you’ll find me at the piano, weaving brooding yet nostalgic compositions until that first ribbon of dawn emerges and the final haunting notes lock into place. Crafting those motion collages by stitching smartphone clips, encapsulating slices of life and the ever-changing faces around me into a visual tapestry that matures like a fine vintage – that’s another compulsion I can’t shake.
At my core, I’m still that awe-struck kid, forever enthralled and deeply gratified by every meticulously planned or spontaneous burst of creativity. My love affair with the arts inevitably led me down the winding path of philosophy, getting intimate with aesthetics and film theory – and make no mistake, I’m an avid cinephile through and through.
The concept for this digital playground struck me during a two-month hospital stint, forced to reflect on my body of work scattered across countless projects. Gathering it all here was about charting my creative journey, tracing my evolution as an artist and stoking that endless need to explore uncharted aesthetic territories. What you see is predominantly the stuff I tinker with whenever inspiration strikes.
Curious about my professional hustle? Hop over to www.cosalux.com – as a senior art director at that creative powerhouse for over a decade now, my fingerprints are all over the featured projects. But every photo, video and handcrafted tune on this site? That’s 100% pure, uncut Stanko. Need backup for marketing initiatives, bold new creative ventures, killer concept development or fresh branding strategy? I’m also available for freelance gigs – just slide into my emails, the link’s down in the footer.
Latest posts
Photography
My descent into this mind-bending realm of creative obsession and making shit happen all kicked off randomly with photography. It was ’99, just another lit party scene going down in Neu Isenburg. My boy Zoran was rocking this cheap little pocket cam – nothing fancy, just a basic point-and-shoot tourist trap, but delightfully old school film. Fueled by that electric party atmosphere and having tossed back a few, I snapped a shot of the sunrise from the balcony on a whim.
Few days later, Zoran slides me that photo. Surface level, just your run-of-the-mill sunrise pic, the kind that litters the web nowadays. But this particular snapshot, I kid you not, it burrowed into my consciousness for weeks, maybe months. I was fresh into my philosophy studies back then, already consumed by aesthetics, so I found myself trapped in an endless cerebral spiral over this single image for hours upon hours. Didn’t take long before I caved and invested in my first real camera, that beloved Pentax ME Super, and just like that, a new all-consuming obsession sparked to life.
Design & user experience
My first crack at “design” gig happened back in ’01 – had to throw together a flyer for a so called “two room party” my roommate and I were organizing. Thought to myself, how tough could it be to slap some info on a piece of paper and make it pop, right? Well, after grappling with this supposedly simple task for two full days, I quickly realized I was in over my head – especially for a philosophy-minded nerd like me who craved creating something visually electric but had never even opened InDesign, Illustrator or Photoshop until that very moment. Turns out, becoming a semi-competent graphic designer wasn’t just a few hours of button-mashing, as one might naively think. But hey, at least I managed to get a grip on Photoshop during that trial by fire.
Fast forward a couple years, I started freelancing for Icelandair, mostly video gigs and snapping pics of that volcanic paradise. Every now and then they’d hit me up to design their PowerPoint decks and some magazines too, so I dove deeper into the graphic design rabbit hole – exploring the core principles of visual language and how to artfully bend those rules. 2012 rolls around and I’m working as a motion designer at COSALUX, this communication design powerhouse based in Offenbach. But just two years later, I leveled up to senior art director, getting my hands dirty with all kinds of pure graphic design and user experience projects. Here on this site, you’ll find the studies and experiments I’ve been cooking up in my free time within this boundless creative real
Video & motion design
Getting drawn into this whole motion picture game went down pretty randomly, just like most things in my life. It’s 2001 and I’m feeling myself, scooping up my first ever digital camera – this Sony DSC-S85 beast that could pump out 4-megapixel photos, stupid high-res for stills at that time. And it could also shoot video, though the specs were way more modest at 320×240, 16 frames per second.
I was a dead broke college kid back then, juggling all kinds of odd jobs to stay afloat. One of those side hustles was babysitting, no joke. And one of my clients happened to be the general manager for Icelandair’s whole European operation.
So there I am one night posted up at the Sigurfinnsson family’s crib, watching their two little rugrats Andrew (4 years old) and Silja (2 years young). Of course, I brought my new digital toy along and decided to finally mess with that video function. Being a big kid at heart myself, we all just started clowning around having a blast, and I captured some of that magic. I even let 2-year-old Silja get behind the camera – a terrifying decision for sure, but the clips she got were weirdly genius.
Soon as I got home, I scrambled to learn how to edit videos, suffering through some ridiculously slow tutorials before figuring out Movie Maker. Stitched all that footage into a mini movie and very next day, burned it onto a CD to send over to Mr. Sigurfinnsson. Dude calls me right away, hyped, asking if I could make more vids capturing the spirit of Iceland in that funny but at the same time heartfelt way. Only tweaks needed were bumping up the resolution and smoothing out the motion. “Yeah, absolutely, no problem – I’m a total pro,” I lied through my teeth in that moment. Couple days later, I came clean about being completely new to this. Crashed the library, crammed every video guide I could find, copped my first legit camcorder that could do standard 720×480 definition. Within a week of that fateful call, I was on a flight to Iceland to kick off my professional videography hustle. Over the next two years, I made five more work trips out to that volcanic paradise, and my side-passion as a video producer was finally taking off.
Computer Graphics
My first foray into the raytraced CG world stretches back to 2003 when my boy Jonas put me onto Cinema 4D. Back then, it seemed like straight-up wizardry how effortlessly you could model and render photorealistic scenes. I was instantly hooked and hunkered down to craft my first ever 3D room jam-packed with objects, bringing my vision to life. Pure creative bliss, especially for someone like me who gets off on building shit from the ground up – true tabula rasa style. However, that euphoric high came crashing down hard when I finally hit that render button. My janky PC needed a brutal 50 hours just to crunch out one measly 1280×720 still image. Damn you, global illumination! After pouring sleepless days into modeling, having to wait literal days to peep the final result was just straight-up wack. So for the next decade, I mostly stayed on the sidelines with 3D, only dabbling in projects here and there, usually rocking VRAY.
The real game-changer landed around 2012 with Octane Render, the world’s first unbiased GPU renderer. I was all over that shit, diving head-first back into the raytraced computer graphics universe, otherwise known as offline rendering.
As for real-time graphics, that didn’t grab me until 2016. I’ve been a die-hard gamer since way back in the 80s – cutting my teeth on the Spectrum 48 and Commodore 64, pulling all-nighters on classics like Donkey Kong and Pacman. But after swimming in those photoreal raytraced waters, the graphics of real-time engines felt dull and flat, so I wasn’t trying to mess with them. That all flipped when I landed my first commercial Unity gig, which required cooking up this futuristic, flexible UI concept rendered on a transparent glass panel packed with like 120 different electronic products, all in real-time. I had to make that sucker look crispy, and we freaking nailed it – even scored a Red Dot Award. That experience lit a new fire under my ass for game engines. After wrapping up more Unity projects, I discovered Unreal Engine 4. My enthusiasm leveled up into pure euphoria, and UE4 has been my rendering weapon of choice for most projects since.
Tunes & music production
Music has always been the beating heart driving my existence, and I’m fully aboard with Nietzsche’s words: “Life without music would be a goddamn mistake.” At first, I was just an obsessed listener, and scoring a chance to record a song off the radio or finally cop that album I’d been fiending for felt like hitting the lottery. My first stabs at actually making music were born out of pure necessity. It’s 1992, the Bosnian war is raging, and electricity was a luxury we’d get for maybe two hours every two weeks. Two weeks sans music? Hell nah. So I taught myself guitar, sometimes posted up riverside for hours on end, looping the same couple songs into oblivion. Sure, practice makes perfect and all that, but the real reason was I couldn’t get enough of those fragile sounds bleeding out of my ancient six-string.
Fast forward to ’98 after relocating to Germany to study in Frankfurt am Main – I finally get my hands on this Roland MC-303 groovebox. Those following days were just sleepless, man. Couldn’t pry myself away from tinkering with that beast, even pumped out a full album within a couple weeks. Quickly realized the limitations of an all-in-one box like that though, so I started exploring heavyweight DAWs – messed with Reason, Cubase, Logic Pro before finally settling on Ableton Live. Funnily enough, it was the same dude who put me onto Cinema 4D, my man Jonas, who first showed me Ableton. Over the years, I’ve also dived deep into the Native Instruments realm, copping their full Komplete suite and Maschine, plus plugins from cats like Urs Heckmann’s Diva, Zebra, and more. Those are my main production weapons nowadays.
Wrap-up
Hell yeah, these are my roots. My path into the wild world of creativity might look like a series of accidents, a chaotic dance of chance, but it’s a damn good mirror of who I am. Like Columbus of the mind, I’ve charted a course through art and ideas, constantly finding new continents within myself. It’s a dream I’m living wide awake, a testament to the belief that the greatest journeys are often the ones we stumble into.
Rituals? Love ’em. They ground us in the chaos. But repetition? That’s a slow death. A job where every day is the same? My personal hell, a rejection of the constant evolution that defines existence.
You’ve met the mind behind this playground. Now, dig deeper into my experiments, a testament to the endless possibilities that emerge when we embrace the unknown. I feed on feedback, so hit me with your thoughts. Got a project that needs a jolt? My inbox is open. Find the link below, tell me your story, and let’s see what kind of fire we can start. In the grand tapestry of existence, collaboration is the spark that ignites true creation.