Duane Melius

Things people connected with.

Twenty-five years of making them: a national magazine, campaigns across Asia, a team built from nothing, software, and now songs and stories.

Each record here is one piece of work. Flip through, pull one out, and read the liner notes.

← → to flip, Enter to play. Or just click.Swipe the crate to flip. Tap a sleeve to play it.

Your collection

Play a record to add it here.

    Hidden track. You played the lot.

    Make something real. Then let it go, if you have to.

    Thanks for listening all the way through. If something here landed, I'd love to hear about what you're making. Tell me.

    The person behind the sleeves

    I'm Duane. I started by founding a youth magazine in the UK and never really stopped making things. That led to building social teams across Singapore, India and Indonesia, running a boutique agency, and leading digital for Burson-Marsteller in Germany.

    The thread through all of it is simple: find the human thing in a brief, then build the system that gets it to people. These days I also build software, make music, and write short pieces as Dante Black.

    Based in Brighton & Hove. Open to digital, social and creative leadership roles, remote or hybrid.

    • 10,000magazine copies in print, at its peak
    • 0 to 12specialists, across three countries
    • 1 millionfans for Mahindra in a year
    • 10 minutesfor a pitch strategy that took two weeks
    • £250Kpitch won in my first month freelance
    • 26 to 96mobile speed score, Perfect Pitch rebuild

    Worked with

    Agencies

    WPP, VMLY&R, Burson-Marsteller, STW Group

    Finance

    Barclays Investment Bank, Standard Chartered, OCBC Bank, Visa, Prudential, ANZ, CFA Institute

    Tech

    Google, Microsoft, Cloudflare, Deloitte, Epson, Olympus, 3M

    Consumer

    Heineken, Danone, Revlon, Club Med, Agoda, Mahindra, CooperVision, Sistema

    Media

    Sony Pictures, MTV, Channel 4

    Public

    MINDEF, GovTech, Singapore Tourism Board, UK Cabinet Office

    Let's make the next one.

    duane@wemakesense.org

    AThe brief

    BWhat happened