Hi! My name is Lucijan. I’m a front–end designer from Croatia and one half of Blagonic Brothers, small design studio focusing on consulting and delivering quality work to clients worldwide.

I prefer interactive prototypes over static images, so I often jump into browser and communicate my designs directly on your screen. I’m always ready to experiment with new technologies and try out different approaches for specific problems. Although I might occasionally design a logo in Illustrator—my natural habitat is the browser. It’s where I’m most comfortable—working with HTML & CSS, adjusting whitespace, colours, typography and tinkering with interfaces until they feel easy enough to use.

When working on bigger projects, I prefer to build a design system which will enable developers and clients to think of design elements as LEGO blocks and build new pages and scenarios with ease. Thinking in terms of Style guides forces the team to build a strong and consistent design language for a specific project.

I try to share my experience as much as I can. Speaking at local user groups and conferences, but also trying to share my work with the open source community. Find some interesting open–source projects and ideas on the lab section. I’m helping organize a WordPress community in Croatia. Starting with WordPress Coffee and continuing with regular meetups. We’ll see where will it take us, but for now, I’m really excited to be a part of it.

About The Site

Polarnorth.org always served as a personal playground. Over the time, it underwent several changes, from static HTML + CSS to a Jekyll template and finally as you see it today — a WordPress theme. Beautiful typefaces, Soleil and Abril Titling are served via Typekit.

The starry night illustration on the homepage is based on real star data up to 5.9 magnitude. The illustration was prepared in Illustrator and other changes (like transitions and animations) were done directly in the code. You gotta love SVG.  You can generate your own starry night here (awesome).

Why Polar North?

Polar nights are cold and last long—something astronomers really appreciate (myself included, as an amateur astronomer). North star or Polaris as we call it is closest to the north celestial pole. Helpful when you are stargazing around the night sky. Combine those two together and you get Polar North. As an astronomer aficionado, I welcomed the reference and decided to use it for my site.