Have you ever wanted to create something greater than yourself? Not just a character, but a living extension of your essence — a being that doesn’t imitate, but distills; that doesn’t follow, but speaks for you; that doesn’t just live, but outlives you, carrying your emotional DNA. That’s exactly how this project was born — not as an idea, but as an inner necessity. It’s not just personal — it’s intimate. It became the starting point for Collecto (more on that later), and fulfilled one of my most profound creative dreams: not to build an image, but to craft an entire dimension where I exist fully — as a human, as a professional, as a living, imperfect, deeply feeling organism...

Meet Dalton! He’s not a character. He’s a projection. A visual voice shaped not over a week, but through a long, exhausting, yet almost magically generative creative process. Inside him live my habits, my moods, my attention shifts — the internal mechanics of my life. He doesn’t just resemble me — he is me. He has ADHD. He’s a brand designer and a marketer. He dives so deeply into his work that he often loses his sense of self. He gave so much of himself to projects, visuals, and ideas that one day… he simply burned out — and forgot what color he was. As if his entire system had rebooted. And when he emerged from that scorched mental space, he came out pink — the same pink that mirrors my emotional nature, the same color that’s been following me for years, both visually and mentally. That’s how the world met the first pink chameleon designer with ADHD. Real. Vulnerable. And beautiful precisely because of that imperfection.

His name is Dal’ton — a name rooted in my own last name (Dal’tone). His look? It’s built from my wardrobe, my accessories, my AirPods Max, my coat, my posture, the visual tone of my mood. He’s literally me — just in miniature. And at some point, I realized: he resembles me more than I resemble myself. That’s when I stopped seeing him as a character. He became a brand. A concept. A way of speaking to the world without opening my mouth. Through him, I speak in meaning, emotion, color, type, attitude. He became my way of showing up. He is my emotional interface. Everything surrounding him — from his font to his stickers to his logo — went through dozens of iterations, breakdowns, rewrites. But it wasn’t just work. It was autotherapy. I was building myself. Pixel by pixel.

To understand where it all began, you have to go back to childhood. I always dreamed of having a vinyl figure that could “be me” when I wasn’t in the room. I never needed to say much — just wanted one strong visual that could sit on a shelf and speak for me. I grew up watching The Pink Panther, Cruella de Vil, Mr. Trans. Not obsessively — but I was obsessed with their essence. Their attitude. Their aesthetics. Their bold strangeness. Their recognizability. Their truth. These archetypes imprinted themselves on me more deeply than I ever realized. And in 2025, their spirit reawakened and materialized — in my mascot, in my medium, in my Dalton.

Today, he’s my personal avatar. He was born as a mascot, but became a language. A creative life-form that reflects not only my “self in the now,” but my evolution, my pain, my energy, my surrender, my chaos, my clarity, my freedom. In every version of him, there’s no performance — only honesty. No just-aesthetic — but personality. No empty visual — but a soul.

Designer's ADHD

Have you ever wondered what ADHD looks like from the inside — not as a diagnosis, not as a list of symptoms, but as a living ecosystem? As a visual and emotional experience, as an aesthetic, as an inner rhythm you can’t switch off? Especially when you’re a designer — when your mind is a studio, an archive, a turbulence zone, and a gallery of ideas all at once. ADHD isn’t just “too much energy” or “trouble focusing.” It’s the feeling that inside you live a visionary genius, an anxious strategist, a wide-eyed child, and a total blank — all at the same time. It’s the mental swing between hyperfocus and total dissociation. It’s you, finishing a perfect grid layout at 4am that no one asked for. It’s you, ten minutes later, forgetting why you opened Photoshop. It’s not a personality trait. It’s a habitat. A pulse. A cycle. A silent engine that either fires you up or shuts you down.

When you’re a designer with ADHD, your creativity isn’t a tool — it’s a force of nature. You don’t control your ideas — you chase them. You don’t decide your direction — you collide with it. That’s how my character was born. Not from a concept. Not from a reference board. He came out of the stream. From a state of obsession, almost trance. He isn’t a mascot. He’s a witness. My inner companion. He is me — made visible. He feels like I feel. He swings like I swing. He overplans, overthinks, unravels. He wants everything — and then nothing at all. He’s pure impulse. He’s pure truth. He’s a visual diary of my neurodivergence.

Through Dalton, I was able to do something that words never could — to visualize ADHD as an experience, as a state of being, as a rhythm of life. His mood swings, chaotic focus, emotional spikes, and the constant shifts between inspiration and total burnout — I captured all of it in a sticker series. There are 57 in total. Right now, 32 are finished. The rest are in limbo: some trapped in layers, some sitting in sketch files, some still pulsing in my head, waiting for the right mental state to bring them to life. Because that’s how ADHD works — you can be completely obsessed with a project, love it with every fiber of your being, and still burn out from the inside. And then even the thing you love most becomes impossibly heavy. And that’s not failure. That’s not chaos. That’s honesty. It’s the honest architecture of how I perceive and process the world. My system — not perfect, but sincere. Digital. Visual. Emotionally precise. Because ADHD is not the enemy. It’s the creature inside. You can’t tame it, but you can listen to it. It doesn’t block my creativity. It creates with me. Sometimes in spite of me. Sometimes in perfect resonance.

While Dalton’s main outfit is a pink striped sweater, I deliberately stepped away from that default look for the sticker series. I pulled pieces from my real-life wardrobe — colors I love just as much as pink, but softer, calmer, more balanced for small-scale formats. It wasn’t just an aesthetic choice — it was about capturing the emotional tone of a specific moment. Each sticker is a snapshot of one mental state. That’s why the details mattered so much. Especially his pupils — they never repeat. That wasn’t a coincidence. It was an intentional decision. Each one was drawn from scratch, every single time. Because every moment, Dalton is different. In a different sensitivity. In a different kind of focus. His eyes are like a weather report — tracking where he is right now. Which also means: tracking where I am. And that, too, is part of the system. Not for style. For meaning.

Сollecto: space of conceptual imprints

For a long time, I was creating concepts that came from within me — not for someone else. Complete projects — from idea to visual, from logic to packaging. They weren’t commissioned. They simply had to come out of me. Not exercises. Not practice. But impulses. Real, lived, emotionally charged impulses. But since there was no external demand, they had no “life” in the world. They were born — and remained in the shadows. Stored away in my archives, in layers, in sketchbooks, in thoughts. I didn’t publish them. Not because they weren’t “ready,” but because I wasn’t ready to let them go. I kept telling myself they might be useful someday, that they’d eventually become part of something bigger, folded into someone else’s brief. But deep down, I simply didn’t know where to release them.

Until one day, one of those concepts was purchased — fully, and by accident. No edits. No adjustments. Just as it was. And it became the core of someone else’s project. That’s when it hit me: concepts aren’t drafts. They’re not placeholders. They are complete entities. They are products. And they deserve a home of their own.

Since childhood, I’ve been a fan of Funko and Youtooz — two brilliant companies that shaped my perspective on collectible product design and art toys. I always dreamed of creating my own vinyl figure — not just an object, but a physical reflection of myself in this world. And right at the moment when I began developing my own methodology for working with concepts — Conceptions: It’s Incept — and when the number of those concepts became impossible to manage, I realized something: I wasn’t just designing concepts. I was collecting them. Hoarding them. Protecting them. But never showing them.

And I asked myself — who am I to decide whether they deserve to be seen or not? That’s where the idea of conceptual collecting was born.

That’s how Collecto came to life.

Collecto isn’t a product line. It’s not a brand. It’s not a store. It’s a territory of ideas that don’t depend on market demand. A conceptual branch of the Pantagonica Creative ecosystem, personally curated by me, Jastiffel. It’s not a commercial venture. It’s a form of liberation. A space where every idea — even the strange ones, the illogical ones, the incomplete ones — is allowed to exist. No genre limits. No format boundaries.

It’s not about figurines. It’s not about “design” as an industry. It’s about the concept — as a language. As a tool for self-understanding. As an independent emotional entity. Above all, Collecto is the face of every concept living inside me — sometimes quietly, sometimes boldly. It’s more than sketches and theories. It’s the echo of my creative heart. And now, it finally has a name.

Dal’ton is not just a character. He was the first to step out of the shadows and materialize.

This is where it all began. He became the zero point of Collecto — the project where an idea stopped being just an idea. Where an inner voice took shape, weight, form. Where something born in sketches, margins, scattered notes and silent thoughts finally found a body. I went all the way. I didn’t stop at visuals, grids, or renders. I built a physical prototype of a collectible figure — the very artifact I dreamed of as a child. Back then, I imagined a day when there would be something on the shelf — not just an object, but a reflection of myself. Silent, aesthetic, deeply personal.

Now that dream is no longer inside. It stands. It exists. It breathes. Dal’ton has become an embodied concept, the first artifact from the universe of Collecto. And maybe someday, you’ll be able to hold him in your hands — pass him on as an idea shaped into physical form, send him across the world, from hand to hand, from heart to heart. But even if there’s only one for now — this one means everything. He is proof that concepts don’t have to stay in your head. That an idea deserves form. That a dream — if it’s truly yours — can sit on your shelf and look right back at you.