Chapter I — The Journalist
Ivan started out asking hard questions for a living. As an investigative journalist, he learned that the real story is almost never the first one someone tells you. It lives three follow-up questions deep, behind a politely closed door, underneath a statistic that doesn't quite add up. Interviewing sources, digging through records, cutting everything to the bone until only what mattered remained — that discipline rewired something permanently.
Journalism taught him that clarity is an act of respect. That obscuring information — whether in a news story or a product interface — is never neutral. That the person on the other end of your work is real, busy, and deserves not to be confused.
Chapter II — The Copywriter
From journalism he moved into copywriting and brand strategy. Where journalism was about finding truth, copywriting was about communicating it — choosing the right register, the right density, the right moment of silence. Every word that survives a copy edit earns its place. Every word that doesn't, didn't deserve one.
He worked across brand identity, product naming, campaign writing, and editorial. The craft of saying exactly the right thing to exactly the right person — without condescension, without noise — turns out to be the same skill that lives at the centre of good UX. He just didn't know to call it that yet.
Chapter III — The Builder
Wanting to build what he was writing about, Ivan taught himself front-end development — HTML, CSS, then JavaScript. Not enough to call himself an engineer, but enough to understand the gap between intent and implementation. Enough to know what's hard, what's cheap, what breaks at scale, and what a developer means when they say "that's not possible" versus what they mean when they say "that's not easy."
That overlap — design that understands engineering constraints — became the foundation of every enterprise engagement that followed. It's the reason handoff conversations tend to be short.
Chapter IV — The Designer
Product design pulled all three disciplines together. The journalist's instinct to question, the writer's commitment to clarity, the builder's respect for feasibility — they collapsed into a single practice. Early work at KupujemProdajem, Serbia's largest C2C marketplace, introduced the humbling reality of designing at scale: millions of sessions per month meant that a layout decision was never academic. The practice since then has been enterprise: Apple, Siemens Gamesa, Volkswagen Group, Terabase Energy. Complex products. Expert users. High stakes. Mostly under NDA.
The honest version of 10 years: a lot of concepts that didn't survive contact with engineering constraints. A lot of decks that were beautifully argued and quietly shelved. Production design — the slow, unsexy work of speccing edge cases and sitting in Jira — takes up more time than anyone shows in a portfolio. The rough lessons mostly involved learning when to hold a position and when holding it is just ego dressed up as principle.
Chapter V — The Singer
Somewhere alongside all of this, Ivan has always written songs. Not as a hobby — as a necessity. Singer-songwriter is the right word for it: guitar, voice, the kind of lyrics that take longer to finish than a full design sprint. Influences run from Father John Misty to Nick Cave to Tool — artists who treat a song as an argument, a confession, and a piece of craft all at once.
The connection between music and design isn't metaphorical. Both disciplines are about ruthlessly cutting everything that doesn't need to be there. The song that doesn't have an unnecessary chord. The interface that doesn't have an unnecessary state. The second keeps the first honest — and the first keeps the second sane.
