Creative Convos: Dines

Dines
Dines is a graphic designer and creative director who graduated with a 2:1 at a university in Southampton, 8 years ago.

In the beginning, Dines was inspired by cartoons and manga that he used to watch when he was younger as he saw it as being playful and not too serious in which is his design approach.

He likes to draw and his unique design style is to mix illustrations with other forms of creative outputs such as photography. He likes to mix cultures - renaissance painting and his own style together to create something unique and different which people like.

His first ever gig was to create a poster for a nightclub in London called 'Orange Rooms'. His work got printed into leaflets and posters. For Dines, he really felt the impact of his design when he saw his poster in a stranger's wall at a house party and thought that design is about making people feel happier through visuals.

Dines advice is to get rid of @ emails that contain hotmail, gmail, outlook etc... It is not as professional and people/brands are less likely to respond to your email as opposed your own email mailbox name.

Studio BLUP
Him and his best friend from the same course from university are 50/50 partners at BLUP Studio in which they had founded and are now a team of 7. 'BLUP' has no meaning in particular, it is just a simple and easy word to say and use.

The studio is about being in the culture and going to gigs and fashion shows. They have clients such as Adidas, Nike, P&G, Universal Music, Sony and BBC.

Soccerbible
Dines had contacted Soccerbible serval times to ask if he could design the front page for their magazine which was France-themed. Soccerbible agreed and he then persisted on asking them if he could also create the cover design for the magazine, in which they already had a bunch of people asking to do it. They allowed Dines to create the cover design as well as the front page and he had sent them videos of the cover being designed behind the scenes so Soccerbible had free content for their social media.

Personal goals and visions

• Win awards
• Inspire millions
• Provide for his family
• Live like a G.

Drunk nightclub

Dines was the creative director for the designs at Drunk nightclub in Southampton. His work was recognised by other nightclubs - especially ones that played house music in their clubs and his designs were known to other nightclubs all over Europe.

From the Drunk nightclub design recognition, Adidas reached out to BLUP to create invite designs for the Olympics in which they did. He added that they almost lost their money as they did not read the small print of the brief where it told them to package each invite in a black envelope.

"Commit first, figure it out later."

Cadbury

Cadbury had asked Dines if he knew how to use Cinema 4D and he said he did. He had to watch YouTube tutorials all night to see how to use it. Luckily, he did successfully create the Cadbury Olympics design.

P&G

Dines created a website for Lacoste and that's what got him into designing for Protector & Gamble and has made more of their designs ever since.

International dominance

They created a design featuring the England football team for Singapore which got them recognised by G.E.M, a Hong Kong singer and created all designs for her.

BLUP

Blue have launched their own clothing in which they have their logo and other designs printed onto.

Dines advice is to learn as much skills in design as possible.