Dan has spent two decades building brands — embedded in the Sydney scenes he cares about most: queer culture, arts, music and hospitality. He started Studio Codyre-Vianez to do that work deliberately, on his own terms, with the communities he belongs to.

He brings director-level strategic rigour to every project — the kind earned leading brand and creative teams across a decade of senior roles in Australian brand design — but his instinct has always been toward the cultural and the human. The brands he's most proud of are the ones that made people feel something: belonging, joy, defiance, appetite.

Working with Dan is collaborative by design. He asks the questions clients don't always expect, pushes back where it matters, and stays genuinely close to the work from the first conversation to the final handover. Most clients end up as friends. That's not incidental — it's how the best work gets made.

As a queer man who is part of the vibrant Sydney LGBTQIASB+ community, Dan is also building something beyond the studio. He wants to be the kind of creative leader he didn't always see coming up through his career — visible, successful, and unambiguous about who he is and what he stands for. That ambition shapes every brief he takes on.