Istanbul had something beautiful back then: the streets had opinions.
Beyoğlu, Galata, Karaköy — not just neighborhoods. Musicians, small venues, photographers, writers, DJs. A scene that fed itself; something that felt like just real life from the inside, even if the rest of the world was calling it "cool Istanbul."
Weartbeat was that scene's memory.
It started as a blog but was never just a blog. We made videos — natural light, city noise, people not looking at the camera. We curated venues, programmed nights. Through Music Alliance Pact, we brought She Past Away and The Away Days to The Guardian and Stereogum. Not promotion — cultural translation. Keeping the original texture intact while making it legible to someone in Seoul or London.
But cities have breaking points too. Venues shut down. Festivals were cancelled. The ecosystem we'd built on top of was quietly being dismantled. I didn't close Weartbeat. The city it was built on changed.
The Story why I return.
The Story why I return.
Season 01
Weartbeat
The Music Community
Istanbul
2010 - 2014
Istanbul had something beautiful back then: the streets had opinions.
Beyoğlu, Galata, Karaköy — not just neighborhoods. Musicians, small venues, photographers, writers, DJs. A scene that fed itself; something that felt like just real life from the inside, even if the rest of the world was calling it "cool Istanbul."
Weartbeat was that scene's memory. It started as a blog but was never just a blog. We made videos — natural light, city noise, people not looking at the camera. We curated venues, programmed nights. Through Music Alliance Pact, we brought She Past Away and The Away Days to The Guardian and Stereogum. Not promotion — cultural translation. Keeping the original texture intact while making it legible to someone in Seoul or London.
But cities have breaking points too. Venues shut down. Festivals were cancelled. The ecosystem we'd built on top of was quietly being dismantled. I didn't close Weartbeat. The city it was built on changed.
Istanbul had something beautiful back then: the streets had opinions.
Beyoğlu, Galata, Karaköy were not just neighborhoods. Musicians, small venues, photographers, writers, DJs. A scene that fed itself; something that felt like just real life from the inside, even if the rest of the world was calling it “cool Istanbul.”
Weartbeat was that scene’s memory.
It started as a blog but was never just a blog. We made videos — natural light, city noise, people not looking at the camera. We curated venues, programmed nights. Through Music Alliance Pact, we brought She Past Away and The Away Days to The Guardian and Stereogum. Not promotion, cultural translation. Keeping the original texture intact while making it legible to someone in Seoul or London.
But cities have breaking points too. Venues shut down. Festivals were cancelled. The ecosystem we’d built on top of was quietly being dismantled. I didn’t close Weartbeat. The city it was built on changed.
I moved on to find the next stage.
I moved on to find the next stage.
When a new script arrived, my first thought was never about continuity notes. It was: why would anyone come back next week?
I was a director’s assistant on Muhteşem Yüzyıl, handling timecode, scene continuity, actor prep. That was the job. But with every script in hand, before cameras rolled, I kept asking the same thing: if this were Lost, what would make someone wait seven days for the next episode? And when they came back, they had to get what they were waiting for, not entirely, but enough. Feeling that balance, then building it into the scene, that was the real work.
Foreign productions added scale. Script breakdowns, crew coordination, location scouting, casting, the invisible system that keeps hundreds of people in the right place at the right time. Same question, different language.
Ad work came in too. The money was there. But millions of people were going to be exposed to it, and there was no story, no performance, nothing to return to. I didn’t stay long.
Eventually the energy on Turkish sets changed. Quality dropped, things got scattered. I wanted to ask that same question, but for something of my own.
Season 02
Film Sets
Directing the Narrative
Istanbul
2013 - 2019
I was doing design on those sets. I just wasn't calling it that yet.
I was doing design on those sets. I just wasn’t calling it that yet.
When a new script arrived, my first thought was never about continuity notes. It was: why would anyone come back next week?
I was a director's assistant on Muhteşem Yüzyıl, handling timecode, scene continuity, actor prep. That was the job. But with every script in hand, before cameras rolled, I kept asking the same thing: if this were Lost, what would make someone wait seven days for the next episode? And when they came back, they had to get what they were waiting for, not entirely, but enough. Feeling that balance, then building it into the scene, that was the real work.
Foreign productions added scale. Script breakdowns, crew coordination, location scouting, casting, the invisible system that keeps hundreds of people in the right place at the right time. Same question, different language.
Ad work came in too. The money was there. But millions of people were going to be exposed to it, and there was no story, no performance, nothing to return to. I didn't stay long.
Eventually the energy on Turkish sets changed. Quality dropped, things got scattered. I wanted to ask that same question, but for something of my own.
When a new script arrived, my first thought was never about continuity notes. It was: why would anyone come back next week?
I was a director’s assistant on Muhteşem Yüzyıl, handling timecode, scene continuity, actor prep. That was the job. But with every script in hand, before cameras rolled, I kept asking the same thing: if this were Lost, what would make someone wait seven days for the next episode? And when they came back, they had to get what they were waiting for, not entirely, but enough. Feeling that balance, then building it into the scene, that was the real work.
Foreign productions added scale. Script breakdowns, crew coordination, location scouting, casting, the invisible system that keeps hundreds of people in the right place at the right time. Same question, different language.
Ad work came in too. The money was there. But millions of people were going to be exposed to it, and there was no story, no performance, nothing to return to. I didn’t stay long.
Eventually the energy on Turkish sets changed. Quality dropped, things got scattered. I wanted to ask that same question, but for something of my own.
Season 03
Patika The Mindfulness App
Istanbul
2017 - 2021
I learned that the hard way, and moved on.
I learned that the hard way, and moved on.
Turkey didn't have a word for this yet. Meditation was something you did in Nepal or maybe in California, or you didn't do at all. The local read was somewhere between "hippie thing" and "not for us." Mental wellbeing had no everyday language here.
Patika was built to close that gap. We shipped an MVP in June 2017. By January 2018 we were live in beta with a working subscription model, rare for a Turkish app back then, when most people still expected anything digital to be free. Every meditation was written, recorded and edited in-house for a Turkish ear, narrated by people with real accreditation in the field, not just a calm voice reading a script.
We had no marketing budget. What we had was over 200 original meditations and a simple bet: if the content earns a second listen, people come back on their own. App store optimization, word of mouth, a handful of well-placed partnerships made up the entire growth engine. Patika organically became the second most popular wellbeing app on the Turkish market, sitting at 4.5 stars across nearly 1,500 ratings, with roughly 250,000 people meditating with it along the way.
Then came the years that broke a lot of things at once. A pandemic that reshuffled everyone's priorities. An economy in freefall, a lira that kept losing value while our costs didn't, a subscription model that got harder to justify every quarter. We made the call to exit. Patika, the product, the content library, four years of work, was acquired by Dinlebi, an e-book platform building out its own wellness vertical
Patika taught me: a good product and a beautiful experience aren't enough to keep people long-term. You have to design the system, the model, the growth path too.
Turkey didn’t have a word for this yet. Meditation was something you did in Nepal or maybe in California, or you didn’t do at all. The local read was somewhere between “hippie thing” and “not for us.” Mental wellbeing had no everyday language here.
Patika was built to close that gap. We shipped an MVP in June 2017. By January 2018 we were live in beta with a working subscription model, rare for a Turkish app back then, when most people still expected anything digital to be free. Every meditation was written, recorded and edited in-house for a Turkish ear, narrated by people with real accreditation in the field, not just a calm voice reading a script.
We had no marketing budget. What we had was over 200 original meditations and a simple bet: if the content earns a second listen, people come back on their own. App store optimization, word of mouth, a handful of well-placed partnerships made up the entire growth engine. Patika organically became the second most popular wellbeing app on the Turkish market, sitting at 4.5 stars across nearly 1,500 ratings, with roughly 250,000 people meditating with it along the way.
Then came the years that broke a lot of things at once. A pandemic that reshuffled everyone’s priorities. An economy in freefall, a lira that kept losing value while our costs didn’t, a subscription model that got harder to justify every quarter. We made the call to exit. Patika, the product, the content library, four years of work, was acquired by Dinlebi, an e-book platform building out its own wellness vertical
Patika taught me: a good product and a beautiful experience aren’t enough to keep people long-term. You have to design the system, the model, the growth path too.
Season 04
Akbank Experience Design & Brand Lead
Istanbul
2021 - Present
I learned that the hard way, and moved on.
I learned that the hard way, and moved on.
After Patika, I needed to pick something. When Akbank came, I didn't hesitate, not for the stability, but because of what the work actually was. Money is where people carry everything: their labor, their future, their fears, their plans. Designing the relationship between a person and their money meant something to me.
I started inside Akbank Design Studio, contributing to a large structure with a lot of moving parts, not steering it. That changed when I took over Tosla, Akbank neo-bank brand. All of the product's experience design came to me first, and we grew it from a B2C wallet app to 1.5 million active users, with strong market awareness for a product competing against banks with decades of head start. Two years later, brand communication followed too: how the brand looked, how it spoke, ad films, rebranding, agency relationships. A design studio inside a fintech.
The bigger shift came when we moved into B2B and PF, repositioning the product as "Tosla İşim." Launching something Akbank didn't already have in that space was a real bet, and it put us in a strong position among the bank's business lines. I owned brand communication end to end for that launch, the repositioning, the messaging, the full agency stack running underneath it. Creative, PR, events, web, all reporting through me.
The work turned out different than expected going in. Alongside UX, I went deep into payment systems and B2B service design. Small businesses, mid-size companies, enterprises, each with different realities and priorities. There was no "best design" here. The job was finding what actually worked within institutional constraints. Fast. Economical. Correct, not clever.
That wasn't unfamiliar. At Weartbeat, I never picked the best track, I picked the right one for that night. The scale changed. The logic didn't.
The role kept expanding for years. Then Tosla's place inside Akbank changed, and so did mine. I left in the summer of 2026.
After Patika, I needed to pick something. When Akbank came, I didn’t hesitate, not for the stability, but because of what the work actually was. Money is where people carry everything: their labor, their future, their fears, their plans. Designing the relationship between a person and their money meant something to me.
I started inside Akbank Design Studio, contributing to a large structure with a lot of moving parts, not steering it. That changed when I took over Tosla, Akbank neo-bank brand. All of the product’s experience design came to me first, and we grew it from a B2C wallet app to 1.5 million active users, with strong market awareness for a product competing against banks with decades of head start. Two years later, brand communication followed too: how the brand looked, how it spoke, ad films, rebranding, agency relationships. A design studio inside a fintech.
The bigger shift came when we moved into B2B and PF, repositioning the product as “Tosla İşim.” Launching something Akbank didn’t already have in that space was a real bet, and it put us in a strong position among the bank’s business lines. I owned brand communication end to end for that launch, the repositioning, the messaging, the full agency stack running underneath it. Creative, PR, events, web, all reporting through me.
The work turned out different than expected going in. Alongside UX, I went deep into payment systems and B2B service design. Small businesses, mid-size companies, enterprises, each with different realities and priorities. There was no “best design” here. The job was finding what actually worked within institutional constraints. Fast. Economical. Correct, not clever.
That wasn’t unfamiliar. At Weartbeat, I never picked the best track, I picked the right one for that night. The scale changed. The logic didn’t.
The role kept expanding for years. Then Tosla’s place inside Akbank changed, and so did mine. I left in the summer of 2026.
I've been asking the same ever since, why would these people come back? The medium changed — music blog, film set, app, fintech. The question never did.
I've been asking the same ever since, why would these people come back? The medium changed — music blog, film set, app, fintech. The question never did.
