Take just one look at the branding for the ticketing platform DICE, and it’s clear the people behind it are having a blast. With the conversational and self-effacing tone of the DICE brand voice, coupled with the crude and playful illustration style of its graphic identity, one can only assume that those with creative control of the company must be pretty damn cool.
Patrick Duffy is the top dog of the cool cat creative team at DICE. The London-based creative leader and brand builder has been keeping brands weird and provocative for over 25 years, working for companies across tech, advertising, and publishing. Duffy formerly served as the art director of the style magazine Sleazenation, helped establish Airbnb in Europe, and jumpstarted DICE’s growth from a ticketing start-up in Hackney to the global live entertainment juggernaut it is today. Not only that, but Duffy’s unique creative vision and point of view have brought him into the realm of performance, taking the stage as a mime artist at the famed London venue Koko, playing his music on Radio One, and even launching a fanzine.
In every other job, I’ve had to fight (and usually lose) to get weird interesting stuff made.
Duffy recently spoke at the OFFF festival in Barcelona, among 70 other creative luminaries. As one of DICE’s many appreciators, I reached out to learn more about Duffy’s thought process behind its branding.
Where does your humorous and quirky point of view as an art director come from? Have you always had this worldview?
I grew up in the North East of England in an environment where having a sense of humor was essentially a survival mechanism, especially if you were bad at fighting and flirting. I loved reading the third-rate cheap comics you might find on the shelf next to The Beano and Dandy—Whizzer & Chips, Buster—and ingesting Looney Tunes cartoons. I drank a lot of Tizer. I think these three aspects are largely responsible for my worldview as an art director.
I’m quite suspicious of ‘success,’ though. Anything that might be seen as ‘success’ is, in reality, balancing on a mound of failure, and building that mound is the interesting part.
What’s your secret to success for DICE? What core tenets have you kept in mind to make DICE the powerhouse brand it is today?
I just try to make work that I like, that fans might like, that is fun to make, and feels real. I’m quite suspicious of “success,” though. Anything that might be seen as “success” is, in reality, balancing on a mound of failure, and building that mound is the interesting part. As soon as you’ve done the work and it’s “successful,” it’s kind of dead, and you just want to start failing all over again. That’s what I love at DICE— the commitment to a DIY approach to unlock true creativity and productivity in the business and across teams.
How did you develop the black diamond character at the center of DICE’s branding? Where did that idea come from, and why do you think it’s charmed so many?
I’m very pleased that our little black diamond person (a.k.a. The Fan) has proven to be so charming. Our community loves it so much that someone even got it tattooed on their arm. I think people like it because it’s a bit naïve— it’s not polished, so it doesn’t feel so much like a piece of branding.
The design team and I were working on a bunch of ideas, but we knew we wanted something that could come to life, some kind of mascot. We played with different shapes and expressions. I was on a train journey with my family and drew a little diamond shape with eyes and legs in my sketchbook and showed it to my six-year-old. He said he liked it so I considered it approved.
It’s not everyone’s cup of tea, though— a guy wrote a whole blog article about how much he wanted to murder The Fan, so we’ll want to keep an eye on him.
I was on a train journey with my family and drew a little diamond shape with eyes and legs in my sketchbook and showed it to my six-year-old. He said he liked it so I considered it approved.
What’s your favorite part about what you do?
Making weirdness. Not many teams get the opportunity to make what we make, and even fewer would get it approved so easily. In every other job, I’ve had to fight (and usually lose) to get weird, interesting stuff made. At DICE, it’s just the kind of stuff we all like, so there’s no fighting, which is good because I’m getting old.
What’s one piece of advice you‘d give to a burgeoning creative director or brand builder about creating compelling branding and branded content?
Don’t be entitled. You want people to want to work with you and your ideas.