Brand fluency

Every graphic had to recognize a brand in some way. A sports club logo, a museum identity, a political figure, a government institution. The job wasn't deep brand work, but it required reading a brand fast and matching its visual language well enough that viewers could place it instantly. Doing that hundreds of times across two years builds a kind of visual fluency that's hard to learn any other way. Living in the center of Zagreb, I also started carrying a camera off shift, photographing buildings and events around the city. Those photos worked their way into the graphics over time, a small in-house alternative to relying on stock.

Volume and pace

The volume was significant. Looking back through the folders I kept, organized by date, I produced around a thousand finished graphics per year. Some of those were variations on templates, others were built from scratch around a breaking story. The Photoshop skills I had before this job were good. By the end of it, they were sharp in a way that only daily repetition can produce.

What it set up

Croatel was my first real lesson in designing systems instead of one-off deliverables. The reusable templates, the organized asset folders, the patterns shared across the team. None of it was called design systems work at the time, but the instinct was the same. When I moved into product design later, the way I thought about components, patterns, and shared foundations was already shaped by what live television had taught me.

Reflection

Live television had its own kind of intensity that nothing else really replaces. The work was repetitive and dynamic at the same time, with the same deadlines every day but a different story behind each graphic. Looking back, what stayed with me wasn't any single piece I made. It was the habit of working fast without compromising on what landed on screen.

Every now and then I still catch one of my old graphics on air. The shifts are long gone, but the work stuck around.