At this year’s Indigo Festival 2025 in Ljubljana, celebrated designer, artist, and lecturer Slavimir Stojanović Futro will give a lecture on the 10 moments that shaped his life and career — a journey from childhood drawings to international recognition. In this interview, Futro reflects on how to preserve inner peace in a chaotic world and the evolving influence of artificial intelligence on design. He also shares his perspective on the design scene in the Balkans and how a decade spent in Slovenia reshaped his work, vision, and purpose.
You will give a lecture at the Indigo Festival, which takes place from October 8 to 10 in Ljubljana. Can you reveal what you will be talking about and what the audience can expect?
I will be talking about the 10 Moments that shaped my life and career, turning light to dark and then back to light, from childhood drawings to museum pieces, covering all sorts of creative communications like illustration, graphic design, typography, visual art, and writing books for children and adults.
The slogan of this year’s festival is Dark Mode, which we use to adapt to the increasingly gloomy and uncertain world in which we live. How do you personally live and work in this environment of chaos – do you use “modes” or “filters” of sorts to keep your peace?
I was trained long ago to isolate myself from the outer, chaotic world I grew up in, but that is impossible when you love someone, when you have kids, family, friends and when their livelihood is at stake, but I am old enough to know that there is a light after dark, there is peace after war, there are wounds and trauma, but there is forgiveness and love, too, so I choose to live by those simple, but hardest rules.
Today’s world demands from us fast production and constant consumption. How to keep the essence, meaning, and truth in your creativity in this hyperproduction and consumerism?
Truth is the only word that stands the test of time, even though there are constant efforts by the golden middle to undermine it and create a chaotic environment where trust and motives for living are lost. I think we should pay more attention to the sound of our hearts; they grew quiet now, but combining that whisper with a tuned mirror is the only way to stay sane and productive at the same time. We seem to be lost, and we have to start trusting ourselves again.
Artificial intelligence is strongly changing many professions, including design. How do you see its influence on designers, as well as on design itself – as a threat, a tool, or a new opportunity?
The first survival instinct is to be afraid, but I consider AI as a tool that can help us evolve further. Combining new technology and lucid ideas that improve, help, and change the world for the better is the only way forward. It is not easy at all, of course. Today, it seems that we are competing against the complete human creative experience at once, but some will get used to it, use it, and manage to find the way to excel beyond the horizon.
In an interview, you said that you feel good while giving motivational lectures. What do you really want to convey to people through them? What would be your most precious message?
Most of the time, creative people tend to feel small, and the world feels so overwhelming. That is because we forget that the whole universe is inside of us.
You are both an artist and an entrepreneur. Do these two roles sometimes conflict, and what, in your opinion, is necessary for a creator to be able to make a living from his work?
I have been trying for 40 years now to divide my artistic and commercial work. There is an invisible line there, but the best results, creatively and financially, are achieved when you intentionally cross the divide and let those two worlds inspire each other.
How would you currently comment on the design scene in the region, where are its chances, and what do designers in the Balkans still need to work on?
The best thing about the Balkans is its soul, which is very resilient and creatively fruitful. The biggest obstacle is that we tend to hurry and produce more and more fresh ideas, forgetting to take complete care of the previous ones, because there is no actual commercial need for them to be produced in the best possible way. But there is a huge difference between Slovenia and Croatia and the rest of former Yugoslavia.
Culturally and historically, design is deeply rooted in the way of life there, while in Serbia, Bosnia, Montenegro or Macedonia, design is a matter of novice, a visual incident in the everyday chaos, so designers there have the ambivalent role, they are pioneers, but completely irrelevant in the larger picture of the society in everlasting transition, so they fight ten times harder, and because of that, results are never perfect, too.
You spent 10 years in Slovenia. How did it contribute to your work and design?
I was born again in Slovenia. I was 30 years old when I moved to Ljubljana after the NATO bombing of Belgrade, which had already been morally, financially, and culturally devastated before it all happened, so coming to Slovenia was a fresh start. It was all shiny, bright, and new. After years of producing advertising projects for worldwide festivals in Belgrade in Ljubljana, I learned how to be a designer in the open market, how to actually sell ideas to real clients, and make a decent living out of it. But, most of all, I found my purpose – helping other people with my ideas.
