Cem Karabulut | Experience

I've been at Esistenze for over five years now. I started as a Senior Art Director and moved into leading the creative group as the work and the team grew around it. My day is split between setting creative direction for brand, motion and digital projects across very different industries, and staying close enough to the details so nothing drifts along the way.

What I bring to this role is the kind of pattern recognition that only comes from over fifteen years of agency and freelance work. Every brief reminds me of something I've already solved, a tone I've learned to trust, a mistake I've already made for free, an audience I've watched react to a specific kind of visual language. I lean on that history to move faster on the obvious calls and slower on the ones that actually matter, rather than treating every project like a blank page.

A project here usually starts with me spending more time than most would on understanding the brand, not just its brief, its context: who it's speaking to, what's been tried before, what matters to the people inside the company. From there I set a direction, brief the team, and move through review cycles where I try to protect both the idea and the designer holding the pen. The last twenty percent of any project is usually where the work either becomes memorable or stays polite, and I try to spend real time in that stretch.

AI tools are woven into all of this now. Midjourney for concept and mood direction. Stable Diffusion and ComfyUI when I need controlled pipelines or many variations of a single thought. KlingAI and Runway on the motion and video side. ChatGPT as a thinking partner for scripts, prompts and brief analysis. I use them to sketch ten possible directions in the time it used to take me to build one, which means we can decide earlier what deserves a full production cycle and what doesn't. The rule I've settled on is simple: AI for exploration and acceleration, human judgment for everything that reaches a client.

Working remotely means I spend more time inside the work than inside meeting rooms, which suits me. And the part I didn't see coming when I moved into this role was how much I'd enjoy the team side of it, reviewing work with younger designers, unblocking them when they're stuck, and quietly nudging them toward their own voice instead of copying mine.

Two years at kreatiFabrika, mostly on campaign craft, motion, social, Landing Pages and the everyday brand assets that don't make case studies but have to feel right the moment they go live. At this point in my career the real challenge wasn't whether I could switch between brand voices; it was making sure I actually understood each audience before I opened a file.

The client list covered very different worlds: Laurastar, Baseus and Babyliss on the consumer side; Akbank, Enerjisa, Burgan Bank and Ingram Micro on the corporate and financial side; plus Kayalar Kimya, Düfa and Genç. Jumping from consumer tone to B2B tone every few days kept me honest with each brand instead of leaning on defaults.

It's also where I first really met AI tools and started folding them into my daily work. Midjourney became the one I reached for first, for concept visuals and mood direction. When I needed more control or a repeatable pipeline, I moved to Stable Diffusion and ComfyUI, node-based setups that let me push a single idea through dozens of variations without losing the thread. On the motion and video side, KlingAI and Runway handled the generative work. ChatGPT stayed in the loop the whole time as a thinking partner, for scripts, prompts, brief analysis and the kind of back-and-forth that used to only happen inside my head.

I moved past the "what can this do" phase pretty quickly and started using them in actual production: concept visuals that made it into live campaigns, quick product imagery when a proper photo shoot wasn't yet an option, motion storyboards, and fast variations that helped me decide whether a direction was worth spending a full day on.

I still treat them as tools, not shortcuts, but this was the stage where they stopped being a side experiment and started earning a real place in my daily rhythm, next to the rest of my craft.

I packed my bags and moved to the Dominican Republic for this one. Two years away from home, working on Exatlon (USA, Mexico, Romania, Hungary), Survivor (Turkey, Romania), The Voice Turkey and MasterChef Turkey. The content went out on TV8, Kanal D Europe, TV Azteca, Telemundo and later Netflix.

Broadcast is a different beast than agency work. The schedule doesn't care about your weekend. You're either ready for air or you're not. I learned to produce fast, coordinate graphic teams across countries, and stop arguing with reality when the brief changed three hours before an episode went live.

It was the role where I learned how to work under real broadcast pressure, and that changed how I think about deadlines and collaboration.

A four-month role at an Istanbul agency. By this point I was comfortable walking into a new account and picking up its tone quickly, half the job when a role is this short. I worked mostly on three: Avon, Dimes and Obsesso.

For Avon I designed internal communication materials used across their regional offices, a quieter kind of work than most consumer campaigns, aimed inward at the people who sell the brand every day rather than the people who buy it. For Dimes I produced digital campaign assets and microsites, and for Obsesso I designed branded pages for their coffee sub-line aimed at a younger audience.

Short roles don't leave much room for long-term thinking, but they're surprisingly good at forcing you to get the first version right instead of waiting for the third.

A year of working across almost every category you can think of: Electrolux, Beko, Sera Food, Şölen, Greenlog, Türk Nippon Sigorta, İBB, İGDAŞ, Baymak, NoorCM, Vialand, Yurtbay Seramik and Metro İstanbul. Static and motion for social, Landing Pages, logos, catalogs, promo videos, banners.

By the time I was here, switching brand voice between projects had stopped feeling like a conscious effort, the category changed, the discipline stayed the same. This was also the year I started paying real attention to UI/UX, the small layout decisions that make the difference between something that looks nice and something people actually enjoy using.