Howdy!
I’m a designer from Mersin, Turkey
— currently moving pixels in Oakland, CA.
My focus consists of visual design, design systems & product design. I studied Graphic Design at MICA, which means I have strong opinions about kerning, a soft spot for a well-crafted print,
and a weakness for everything 3D
.
In my free time, I like exploring the city with my dog charlie,
going to concerts or picnics with friends, gaming, picking up a new hobby like nail art,
or relaxing in my home and staring at my plants.
More about me...
Projects
01 Here*
02 Multiview
03 Live guide
04 Stem + Leaf
05 Choreathon
Playground
INDEXHere*
2023 – Present
Here* — a platform that enables people to intentionally reflect, connect and share their experiences through a list of their favorite spots.
Role
Chief Design Officer
(See more)
SkillsBrand design
Product design
Motion design
Design systems
Social media marketing
Overview
Here* is a platform to explore, save and share your favorite spots in any city. It allows you to create shareable city playlists and explore whithin your community. Our founder Juliette was seeking a lead that can oversee the brand & product and help bring Here* to life.
The challengeHelp refine the company's mission and develop a robust brand that seamlessly integrates across the landing page, app, and all marketing materials. Using the brand language, create screens and extensive flows that cover critical user journeys — while building systems and flows flexible enough to let the team grow and the product expand. Partner closely with engineers to rebuild both the marketing website and the product from the ground up.
The inspiration
Exploring both organic and structured approaches, I sourced inspiration and proposed various strategic directions for the brand's evolution.
Ultimately, we met in the middle, drawing our primary inspiration from DJ and event posters known for their experimental, community-focused designs with layered imagery and striking typography.
We wanted our brand to be a friendly, energetic, trustworthy
Some other key words I kept in mind while creating the brand were; welcoming, community, lively, personalized, friendly, underground, organic, breaking the grid, layered, complex, reminiscence, youthful
Building the brand
The logomark
The asterisk was used acrossed the whole brand when Here* was first created. It represents our product elegantly since the main goal of Here* is to reference your favorite spots and share with friends why you like them.
The logoTo complement the new asterisk, I made small tweaks to the logo like adding matching slants to a few letters. We moved away from the sentence case for a more casual, friendly logo.
Brand elements
Our brand color, neon yellow is modern, bold, energetic and gets inspiration from highlighting meaningful information. Our secondary brand color, blue grounds our brand and makes it reliable & trustworthy.
Design systemsOn top of creating the brand, I was also in charge of creating and organizing our design systems & figma libraries. Using the brand guidelines, I created components, designed buttons, icons & other UX elements.
We incorporated stickers on our brand to bring a more human touch and give the feeling of collecting and making memories. The stickers aren’t only for decoration, some also have functionalities. eg. guidance arrow, location pin, numbers, buttons
Expanding the brand
I used these design elements to create our marketing website, marketing posts and videos, our new app, emails and more.
Most recently, I’ve been working on expanding our design system and building out our primary flows. More coming soon...
Impact
As a co-founder, and lead designer in a team of three, I touched every part of the creation and launch of this product.
From an ever evolving brand, design systems, and motion to marketing strategy, asset production, and product design – I have helped bring this product from 0 to 1 and beyond
• Gave the brand direction, created visual elements and guidelines to use as we grow and build our product
• Strategized for social media and marketing and created social assets, motion reels and templates to be re-used
• Built out design systems and components that sped up the process of building the app
• Designed and strategized our full demo and worked with our engineers to soft launch a fully functioning product.
Here* website