Branimir Kolarek

Elemental — Dobra djeca

Project

The visual identity and cover of “Dobra djeca”, Elemental’s ninth studio album, were designed for both digital and vinyl release. The solution is based on a restrained, warm colour palette and hand-drawn, heavy-set lettering with uneven edges, giving the album a raw, poster-like energy.

The central motif is a stylised, seemingly naïve figure drawn with a thick black outline and enclosed within the wireframe of a cube. The character smiles while giving a thumbs-up, while the cube functions as a layered metaphor for the screen, the algorithm and the information bubble, as well as the social boundaries within which an entire generation has grown up.
The deliberately ambiguous smile may be read as a gesture of resilience and optimism within a confined space, or as an ironic sign of consent and conformity. This tension reflects the album’s themes of mental health, empathy and the question of how to remain human in a world that often demands the opposite. The accessible, almost childlike visual language places the title between warmth and irony, and between good behaviour as a virtue and as a trap.

Year

2026

Mentors and collaborators

Branimir Kolarek (design)

Client

Elemental

Author

Branimir Kolarek is a research assistant at the Centre for Informatics and Computing of the Ruđer Bošković Institute. Since 2022, he has also worked as a teaching assistant at the Department of Multimedia at the University North.

His professional practice is focused on visual communication, with a particular interest in the visualisation of multidimensional data. He graduated in Visual Communication Design from the Arts Academy of the University of Split and has been pursuing doctoral studies at the Faculty of Graphic Arts, University of Zagreb, since 2023.

He is a member of the Croatian Designers Association (HDD) and the Croatian Association of Artists of Applied Arts (ULUPUH). Over the past ten years, he has worked on projects for the Faculty of Civil Engineering and the Faculty of Architecture at the University of Zagreb, as well as the Croatian Conservation Institute.

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