About
I’m a digital product designer based in southwest Turkey. I run Alis Design, my own studio, and I work the whole arc of a product — research and strategy first, then the design system, then the front-end code.
Who I am
I studied visual communication design at Sabancı University, then spent six years art-directing campaigns for Unilever, Vodafone and Bridgestone, and took a postgraduate year at the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design. I co-founded two products after that: Persona, an email client for iPad that shipped to wide press coverage and whose shares I sold to Eltima Software in 2015, and Selfision, a social platform that launched to users in more than 80 countries.
Since 2016 the studio has worked mostly with newsrooms and rights organizations — bianet, the Human Rights Foundation of Turkey, Hafıza Merkezi, Anadolu Kültür, Reporters Without Borders. Alongside that I spent two years with a US sports-analytics SaaS company, re-evaluating the product, running the research, and delivering their design system.
The research phase is where I do my most useful work — defining the problem properly before anything gets drawn. I stay through the build as well: I write the front-end, so the decisions made in research are the ones that actually ship.
What I do
Research and strategy
Every project starts here. I run the user or reader research, read the analytics, and turn what comes back into a strategy the whole team can work from — usually a written report we agree on before anything gets drawn. For newsrooms and NGOs that increasingly means the AI question: how to adopt it without losing the trust your audience came for.
Design
Interface design and design systems — components, tokens, and the documentation that keeps them consistent as a product grows. I work in Figma, and I design against what can realistically be built, not around it.
Build
I write the front-end: HTML, CSS and JavaScript, custom WordPress themes, and framework-free builds where that is the right answer. Accessibility work lands here too — auditing a site against WCAG and shipping the remediation in code, rather than handing over a list of problems.
Who I work with
Newsrooms and rights organizations
Independent media, human-rights and memory organizations — most of my work for the last decade. Long archives, multilingual content, small teams, and an audience whose trust is the whole asset.
Agencies and studios
Teams that want a senior pair of eyes on the thinking rather than extra production capacity — research, product strategy, or a design system for a client project. Priced by scope, as a named partner on the work.
SaaS and product teams
Products with real complexity behind them, where the interface has to make something dense feel obvious. I come in for the research and strategy, deliver a design system your engineers can build against, and stay available while it ships.
Clients I worked with
Mentions
Education
Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design
Postgraduate Certificate in Interaction Design · 2011 - 2012
Sabancı University
Faculty of Arts · BA in Visual Communication Design · (Full Scholarship - High Honors) · 1999 - 2004
Specialties
- Research and strategy
- Design systems
- Interface and visual design
- Front-end development (HTML, CSS, JavaScript, WordPress)
- Accessibility
- AI-augmented workflow
Get in touch
Have a question or project in mind?
I take on a small number of product-design engagements at a time — research-driven platform work, design systems, and strategy for content-heavy products.
I work remotely from Turkey, with clients in Turkey and the US, in English and Turkish. Projects are quoted by scope.