Danyal is a designer, brand consultant, and the co-founder and Creative Director of Wherefore. He trained as a product designer, a discipline with very little patience for decoration. An object either does its job or it does not. That training left him with a habit he has never shaken, which is to ask what something is for before deciding how it should look. It is where the whole studio's approach comes from. Why before how. What he believes, after nearly a decade of this, is fairly simple. Most organisations are not misunderstood because their logo is weak. They are misunderstood because what they say and what they actually believe have quietly drifted apart. Closing that gap is the part of the work he finds genuinely worth doing, and the reason he still starts every project with conversations rather than sketches. He is also convinced that good design should be explainable. If a client cannot defend a decision to their own board without a designer sitting next to them, something went wrong much earlier in the process. In 2025 he was invited to speak at the Communication Design programme at RMIT University in Melbourne, and in 2026 he returned as a judge for its graduate showcase. He also sits on the judging panel for The Gong Awards 2026. He takes the judging seriously, partly because looking closely at other people's work is the fastest way to stay honest about your own. Outside the studio, he thinks the best things get built with people rather than for them.
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