HAKKI KUTLUHAN YÜCEL

12 CORE

_branding
_brand identity
_visual brand identity
_brand strategy August 2024
12 Core is a mentorship programme which helps the university students in their carreer journey. But much more than that, it is a community, built by people sharing one common goal: progress. It has as much importance to the mentors –professionals from various sectors, which has similar backgrounds to the students– as it has to the students. 



















    ContextMentorship space is a very saturated space, with brands seeing it as a way to increase brand awareness towards students, who are the future employees. 

Secondly, which is more important, they see it as a way to find talent. That’s when the Core team approached, creating a new and exclusive program tailored to specifically to Özyeğin University students. Utilizing the graduate network of the university, Core wanted to embrace the tradition of Özyeğin and help the students improve themselves based on this structure. They also had plans of scaling the program to more campuses.

TaskHow can we create a brand identity that has a sense of tradition, potential, entrepreneurial spirit, while honoring the exclusiveness of the 12 potent students that are accepted into the program?


ProcessIn the early stages of design progress, my focus was on resolving this contrast of tradition and innovation. Often times innovation requires destruction of strong tradition, thinking outside the box, and how can one communicate it trough a design system?
Later, concept evolved into this notion of ‘’intervention’’. Good innovations don’t destruct tradition, they intervene when and where necessary. And when you add the students’ career scope, this idea of intervention extended and fit into the whole context.

When we were discussing the name, we had to add the sense of exclusiveness. So we added ‘’12’’ into the name, showing that there are only 12 seats at the table. This is good for creating a culture in the community and also has a plus for the awareness. But, it’s not uncommon to use numbers in the naming in the mentorship ecosystem. That’s when the idea of using Roman numerals as a way to differentiate ourselves came into the play. While also beautifully becoming a symbol for the whole identity.


Pay-offConsidering the concepts, the logomark was built on the idea of intervention. It is an intervention on a classical typeface, in the form of almost a glitch, suggesting the digital roots and transformation of our era and the program. ‘Glitch’ is also good on communicating our support of tradition while not being afraid to ‘shake it up’ when necessary. 

For the tagline, ‘your future, now’ very simply suggest the fast-tracking of your career, also your development as a person. Starting your future from today, placing 12 Core as a very important step in your goals.

XII Core is a community, with a strong culture of supporting entrepreneurial tendencies. Beyond that, it suggest an identity for young people to navigate into. So, as a way to honor this philosophy the apparels was an important offer for people to embrace and carry this identity with pride.

Unfortunately in the end, XII Core project got cancelled due to feasibility issues. Design got approved though, so it was a very pleasant process that was finalized with positive emotions on my side.


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Hakkı Kutluhan Yücel
2025
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