About the founder
Hi! My name’s Dora Derado Giljanović. I’m an ardent lover of art and everything creative. I also love order and being organized. I use this to help others realize their creative and intellectual visions.
Allow me to briefly introduce myself.
I’m originally a painter by trade. I went on to get a master’s in art history and English language and literature.
I decided to go down this route because I simply love art – literary and visual. This allowed me to complement my practical artistic experience with theoretical knowledge. When it comes to English, which is my mother tongue, I was able to add to my skillset all the necessary grammatical rules, good translation practices, and theoretical literary knowledge that I keep building on to this day.
I have since obtained my PhD in art history and am continuing my journey of supporting all that is creative in this world.
About DLightful Services
The official establishment of the business was prompted by the needs of other businesses for a project manager (similar to a professional organizer in many ways) who could help them manage their day-to-day tasks, schedules, and long-term projects.
However, the business simultaneously sprung out of the needs of creatives and businesses that needed our services as translators, graphic designers, and/or curators throughout the years.
Providing creative and intellectual services is a kind of leitmotif of the business. The only thing that will vary is the ratio of these services, depending on the client’s needs.
Our team have worked in various fields (within and outside arts and culture), which has broadened our horizons and allowed us to integrate all of this collated experience into one, broad set of services.
From the very beginning of DLightful Services, or even through the founder’s volunteer and honorary work prior to establishing it, we’ve been helping artists and creatives by adding to their arsenal of skills and knowledge with our organizational skills and theoretical knowledge, while having the necessary practical knowledge and experience to relate to them.
On the flip side, we’ve helped those that were in need of a certain creative impulse, understanding the analytical side of their brains that often speaks an entirely different language to that of creatives.
Our mission is to make art as accessible and relatable as possible to the broadest public.
This means integrating various skills and knowledge for the promotion and betterment of art and culture.
By using our organizational skills and creativity combined, we help artists get organized and promote their art, while we help cultural and artistic institutions get more creative.
But we go beyond that and place our knowledge and skills to those working in other sectors as well.
We’re about doing meaningful work that helps people grow proffesionally, personally, creatively, and otherwise.
How did I start translating?
I started translating, on a voluntary basis, while I was still in high school.
Growing up in England and as a bookworm, I read everything I could get my hands on – from novels to encyclopedias and, later, scholarly literature.
This set some solid foundations for my later college experience studying English language and literature, during which I sharpened my translating skills and literary knowledge.
I came to realize that translating relaxed me, that I enjoyed it, and could easily lose track of time while I was immersed in a translation project, especially if the text in question was creative or something that I’d like to read anyway since it was close to my field of expertise (especially art and art history).
Until I established DLightful Services, I continued translating various texts on a voluntary and honorary basis. These were mainly exhibition texts, texts from the Humanities and Social Sciences and novels – with the occasional consecutive (oral) translation.
How did I get into graphic design?
My interest in graphic design grew out of my primary vocation – that of a painter – which I earned by graduating from the School of Fine Arts in Split, Croatia.
At the same time as I was developing my painterly skills, I also started learning the basic principles of graphic design and actively using graphic design software.
While honing these skills during college as an art history student, I built upon my practical experience with theoretical knowledge from the history of design and visual communication.
During my work as a Research Assistant at the Art History Department of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences of the University of Split, I took part in courses that taught about, among other things, visual communication.
This whole time, I continued to implement my knowledge through volunteer work as a graphic designer, and, later, through DLightful Services, designing business cards, catalogs, posters, books, as well as logos and other graphics.
How did I start curating exhibitions?
My curatorial practice began during my days as an art history student.
At the time, I curated the exhibitions of my colleagues from the Academy of Fine Arts, simultaneously helping to translate exhibition texts.
After I graduated, I continued to organize solo and group exhibitions, be it as an independent curator or as a member of the Curatorial Team of the Croatian Association of Artists in Split (HULU Split), of which I became a member in 2016.
