HAKKI KUTLUHAN YÜCEL

EŞİK

_branding
_brand identity
_visual brand identity
_brand strategy

 March 2025 - Present
EŞİK is a community space which aims to mediate interactions that spark innovation. EŞİK aims to bring people together in contexts that allow sincere dialogues and build sustainable relationships, rejecting the rules and norms that’s present in the industries, believing they are counter-productive or working against their supposed goals. 















Photography




/:DİYALOG:/

We are very careful with when, how and what we design. For one of the events we have designed a facilitation game in which people are split up to groups, having discussions about sincere and personal matters. /:DİYALOG:/ is the embodiment of EŞİK’s mission: nurturing sincere and personal relations with a community of people that share goals, ideas and habits. Discovering our differences and similarities is a key to building this bond.

   

Context

It was the february of 2025 when a friend of mine and his 2 friends reached me out, asking me for some help in their new work. All three being from the mentorship and fellowship ecosystem, they have seen a need in people across different programs to come together in one single space. While some of the people were in multiple of these programs, the overall scene was very scattered, and getting to know other people from other programs relied on these “multi-program” guys’ personal efforts. 

That’s when they had the idea of creating a single platform to gather everyone. When they had come to me, they have already organised a few pilot events and the feedbacks looked good. Apart from that nothing was determined yet (except for the name, which was Barons at the time.) Luckily enough, it was my kind of situation since I was calling myself a design strategist. 

Task

How can we create a brand, or better yet a movement which connects people, in a new and different -also better- way?


Process

We have started with intense workshops. We had a limited time, since they have already set the date for the first ever event of “whatever we were going to call it”. 

What they were doing was very common, organising events. Since “what” was determined, the importance of the question “how” increased tremendously. I had the sense that what they were trying to do shouldn’t look, feel or talk like anything that already exists. It needed not to be a trend follower, it had to create its own rules and context. 

I have started my works with trying to determine the overall strategy foundation and the community’s premise. After lots of brainstorm and sketches, I have presented 2 options for strategy along with the naming and the general “vibe” of each path respectively. 
The name “EŞİK” stuck, meaning “the verge” in Turkish. It was the perfect illustration of what we were going for: a scene of people who are in the verge of doing something great. And that verge was assigned to us as a location through our name.

Next was the visual identity. It needed to look weird, maybe even grotesk as much as possible. We wanted to tell to the world, “we are here, and it’s our way.” That birthed the logomark in this page, which consists of 3 meanings depending on your subjective perspective.

1- A percentage symbol
2- 2 people, one rising and one falling down.
3- A funky PCB inspired logo that looks a bit technological

Another part that is dear to us is that every naming EŞİK uses is strictly Turkish, trying to find and add new meanings to older or less known Turkish words, feeding our identity with a sense of locality, and innovation that embraces what’s at hand rather than a complete fresh start.


Pay-off

As of today -11.25- EŞİK has reached hundreds of people, even with a silent growth strategy. Have organised physical events in all different locations. 

EŞİK was well recieved with a loyal following base, planning ahead with bigger and more accessible ways to reach people to accomplish the mission ahead.


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Hakkı Kutluhan Yücel
2025
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