How Imran Ali Dina became GFXMentor

A childhood spent with colour, not computers

The episode opens with Muzamil drawing out the earliest thread of Imran Ali Dina’s story: not a tech origin, but an artistic one. Imran describes himself as a deeply indoor child who was always playing with bright colours. The person who crystallised that instinct was an art teacher at his school - a man who, by Imran’s account, was widely mocked by other students for being different. “He didn’t believe in normal drawing,” Imran recalls. Instead, the teacher brought unusual powders and experimental materials to class and encouraged students to play with them rather than follow conventional exercises. It was through this teacher that Imran made his first genuinely good drawing. “I am always thankful to him,” he says - a gratitude he returns to more than once across the conversation.

This early formation matters because it explains something about how Imran eventually teaches: he believes the creative impulse is not transferable through instruction. The teacher didn’t give him technique so much as permission to take colour seriously.

Matric, inter, and the typing-class era

Muzamil asks Imran to walk through the Pakistan of his youth - the career landscape that greeted someone finishing school in the mid-1990s. Imran paints a picture of a world with almost no career counselling. Between matric and inter, the standard advice was to fill the six-month gap with a typing course. Typing was the gateway skill of that era, the thing that made you employable at a bank or a government office. Imran learned to type. He also completed a computer diploma around 1994, at a time when Windows was still a novelty and a computer screen itself felt like a life-changing object. “I always say I saw that era,” he tells Muzamil, “where everything was new.”

The internet, email, and web design were not yet part of anyone’s vocabulary in his circle. What existed was a hunger to figure out what computers could actually do - and Imran fed that hunger wherever he could find a machine to sit in front of.

The failed restaurant and the jobs that weren’t jobs

Before GFXMentor, before university lecturing, before any of it, Imran ran a restaurant. He is candid about this in a way that makes the conversation feel unusually honest. He had pooled money from his father and a brother’s friend, taken on a partner, and opened a small eatery serving nihari and tandoor breakfast. The partnership collapsed. The money was lost. He moved on.

What followed was a sequence of positions that look, in retrospect, like an accidental apprenticeship. He sat at a reception desk for a trading company that imported goods from Sri Lanka. He worked at a catering company. He took a coordinator role at a multimedia institute. None of these were design jobs. But in each one, a computer was present - and Imran used whatever idle time he had to teach himself. At the trading company, he began designing documents and layouts for colleagues who noticed the results. “You’ve done something really good,” they told him. He kept going.

Later in the discussion, Imran describes a period when he had sold his home computer and was effectively without a machine. A coordinator role at a multimedia institute gave him access to computers during the three hours before classes began each morning. He used that window to study Macromedia Flash and other tools, working through whatever he could find - including imported design magazines from a shop in Karachi that stocked foreign publications, where he and a friend would spend hours absorbing tips from printed tutorials.

The accidental teacher

The pivot to teaching happened without a plan. A teacher at the multimedia institute went on leave. Imran, who was working as a coordinator, was asked to cover one class. He did. The students responded well. The institute never returned the slot to the original teacher. “I started teaching,” Imran says, with the matter-of-fact tone of someone describing weather.

From there, the path widened. He eventually moved into university-level instruction. But the structural problem with university teaching, he explains to Muzamil, is the gap between sessions. Students attend once a week for a few hours. By the next class, the material has faded. “They come back after a week,” he says, “and it’s all gone.” His solution was to record what he had taught and put it somewhere students could return to it. That somewhere turned out to be YouTube.

Why YouTube, and why Urdu

Muzamil presses Imran on the decision to build a YouTube channel - and specifically on the language choice. Imran’s answer is both practical and strategic. He had already been teaching the material. The videos were, at first, simply a reference tool for his own students. But he quickly noticed that the platform kept the content alive in a way a classroom could not. “If I’m gone,” he says, “this will remain.” The content sits in the cloud. People keep finding it.

The language decision - Urdu rather than English - was a deliberate bet. Imran reasoned that Pakistan alone is a large country, and that India adds an enormous additional audience. What he didn’t fully anticipate was the global spread of Urdu and Hindi speakers. “I found out that it’s not just Pakistan, not just India - people who understand Urdu and Hindi are sitting all over the world,” he tells Muzamil. The scale of that audience, he says, became clear only after the channel was already running.

Art cannot be taught - only enabled

One of the most developed arguments in the conversation is Imran’s distinction between teaching tools and teaching art. He is firm on this point, and he returns to it from several angles. “Art cannot be taught,” he says. “Nobody will ever be able to teach you how to create.” What an instructor can do is show you how a specific thing is made - which button, which technique, which sequence. But the creative decision about what to make, and why, and with what feeling: that comes from somewhere else.

His explanation draws on the idea of the subconscious. We become expert at things our subconscious has absorbed over time - the way a fluent speaker doesn’t consciously construct sentences, or the way a trained body balances without thinking. Creative instinct works the same way. It is built by exposure: looking at other people’s work, absorbing colour relationships, understanding what different typefaces communicate emotionally. “Every colour has a mood,” he says. “Every font has a mood.” You cannot manufacture that sensitivity in a classroom. You accumulate it by looking.

The practical implication, he tells Muzamil, is that aspiring designers need to spend serious time studying existing work - not to copy it, but to train their subconscious. Someone who locks themselves in a room for two months and produces something without ever looking at what the field has already done will emerge with work that is technically possible but creatively irrelevant. Market research, in his framing, is not a business activity. It is an artistic one.

Building a studio from almost nothing

By the end of the conversation, Imran describes the physical reality of his early recording setup - and it is a useful corrective to any assumption that production quality requires expensive equipment. His studio was a single room in his home. He had the walls painted grey because he liked how it looked, and it turned out to make a clean background. He used a table lamp flipped upside down as a lighting source. He used an iPad as a secondary monitor. His camera, when he eventually got one, was a modest upgrade from the phone he had been using.

“You have what you have,” he tells Muzamil. “You can do very good work with it.” The point is not that equipment doesn’t matter - it’s that fundamentals matter more. Because Imran understood design principles, composition, and light, he could make a small, improvised space produce results that surprised people. The constraint forced creativity rather than blocking it.

On motivation, age, and what Pakistan’s young creators get wrong

Muzamil steers the final stretch of the conversation toward the broader landscape - what Imran sees when he looks at young people in Pakistan trying to build creative careers online. Imran is generous but direct. The most common mistake, he says, is treating online income as a shortcut rather than a skill. People see someone earning well from YouTube or freelance design and assume the path is short. “You’ve just started learning to drive,” he says, “and you want to enter Formula One.”

He is also critical of a culture of dependency - people asking others to tell them what to do rather than exploring what they themselves are capable of. His advice is simple: find what you are genuinely good at, raise the quality of that thing relentlessly, and let the market find you. He uses the image of two cobblers - one cheap and careless, one expensive and precise - to make the point that quality always attracts the right clients eventually.

On age, Imran is almost defiant. He does not consider himself old. He does not plan to slow down. “Think young, stay young,” he says. In a field driven by visual culture and constant change, he argues, that orientation is not optional - it is the work itself.

Muzamil closes the conversation by noting what made the exchange valuable: Imran kept the story grounded in specific moments rather than abstraction, and the philosophy emerged from the biography rather than being imposed on it. For anyone trying to understand how a creative career actually compounds - through failed restaurants, borrowed computers, accidental classrooms, and a camera pointed at a grey wall - this episode is the long answer.