Louise Olsen, Stephen Ormandy and Liane Rossler met while studying drawing and painting at a Sydney art school in 1983.

They formed the company Dinosaur Designs in 1985 and began selling handprinted fabrics and painted jewellery at Paddington Markets.

The intuitive creativity that shapes their distinctive work in jewellery and homewares has also informed the development of their extraordinary company.

Dinosaur Designs now stands as one of the most visible and successful design-based businesses in Australia, operating its own stores in Sydney, Melbourne and New York as well as exporting to more than twenty countries worldwide.

Dinosaur Designs early jewellery was highly figurative, featuring retro spaceships and robots, prehistoric creatures and tattoo-inspired motifs such as winged love hearts and mermaids.

By 1989 the designers had begun to experiment with casting individual beads that could be threaded and assembled in numerous ways.

Natural forms like rocks, shells and flowers inspired many of these beads.

The figurative work continued through the early to mid 1990s, with whole ranges of products designed around particular themes or narratives including the seaside and the Garden of Eden.

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