I’m Dylan Culhane. An illustrator, designer, visual thinker, and maker based in Aotearoa New Zealand.

I’ve been drawing for as long as I can remember. Over time that has grown into a practice that moves between illustration, graphic recording, websites, visual resources, training materials, comics, fonts, card decks, worldbuilding, and small digital tools.

I studied a Bachelor of Computer Graphic Design at the University of Waikato, where I built a foundation in visual communication, design thinking, digital media, and creative problem-solving. After university I ran a small web design business, In-Fuse, creating websites and digital work for local clients.

Alongside that creative path, I spent 15 years working in youth mental health with Emerge Aotearoa. That work shaped a lot of how I think: about people, systems, communication, distress, support, power, accessibility, and the importance of making ideas easier to understand.

Since 2018 I’ve worked with Interactionz, where my role has included graphic recording, illustration, training, graphic facilitation, sketchnoting, accessible communication, and developing resources. Much of that work sits at the meeting point between people and ideas — listening carefully, finding patterns, drawing what is emerging, and helping groups see something more clearly together.

Culhane.nz is my own workshop shelf. It holds personal projects, experiments, fragments, client pieces, worlds, tools, drawings, decks, and things I’ve made simply because I wanted to see if they could exist.

I’m interested in the places where creativity helps people think differently: a drawing that makes a complex idea feel approachable, a deck that opens a reflective question, a website that gives something a home, a fictional world that lets new patterns appear, or a simple visual resource that helps someone feel less lost.

I love exploring new worlds, languages, symbols, systems, and ways of thinking. A lot of my work comes from that same impulse: curiosity, connection, and the wish to make meaning visible.

The social links are the lighter, more public-facing edge of the workshop.

That’s where I’m likely to share sketches, process shots, small updates, works in progress, website experiments, drawings, card deck fragments, finished pieces, and the occasional note about what I’m thinking through.

Culhane.nz is the more settled home for the work — the shelf where projects can live properly. Social media is more like the workbench: less complete, more immediate, and sometimes a bit messier.

If you want to follow what I’m making as it unfolds, the links here are the best places to find me. Some things will eventually become full projects on the site. Others may just stay as fragments, experiments, or small signs of what I’m currently curious about.

I’m based in Aotearoa New Zealand, with most of my life and work shaped by the Waikato.

Place matters to me — not just as a location, but as a way of paying attention. The landscape, language, histories, people, weather, roads, rivers, small towns, community spaces, and everyday rhythms all find their way into the work somehow.

A lot of what I make begins close to home: drawings from family life, websites for people I know, visual resources for community work, imagined worlds that borrow from real geography, and small tools made from the questions I’m carrying at the time.

This site is not trying to feel detached or international in a generic way. It comes from somewhere. It is made from a particular corner of the world, with a particular set of relationships, responsibilities, and curiosities.

I’m interested in work that feels grounded — in people, in place, in story, and in the practical need to make things clearer, warmer, and easier to connect with.