We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Ozan Karakoc a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Ozan, looking forward to learning from your journey. You’ve got an amazing story and before we dive into that, let’s start with an important building block. Where do you get your work ethic from?
Work ethic, responsibility, reliability, honesty, … These qualities have always been my top priority, both in my professional and personal life. However, I have never thought of its source until now.
I believe it comes from the family. My father, who is an incredibly talented illustrator, has always worked as a freelancer in his studio. He never worked at an agency or a company.
Like any other freelancer, he had extremely busy times, as well as quite slow times, but no matter what, he never went to work later than 9AM, or came back home after 8:30PM. That was his principle. And I always showed great respect to that mentality which shows how much he respected his job itself.
If you respect your job that much, you respect your clients and partners equally, and that creates a strong work ethic.
Unless there is a real emergency, I’m never late to a meeting, never delay a deadline, never join a call without enough preparation, and I never mislead my clients, colleagues or partners. That strong work ethic has become a standard for me from the very beginning of my career, and I believe I owe that to my family.
Great, so let’s take a few minutes and cover your story. What should folks know about you and what you do?
Design has always held a special place in my life. Back in Kindergarten, I was already crafting newspapers, captivated by letters, shapes and colors. I knew the flags of every country and could sketch soccer team emblems from memory. I was destined to be a designer!
Surrounded by artists – from my dad, an illustrator, to my mom, who was a graphic designer before my time, to uncles in 3D art and architecture, and a sister who later became a photographer – the path towards becoming a visual creator seemed inevitable.
Formally launching my design journey at the age of 16, my inaugural project was crafting a brand identity for a construction company, followed by designing their website. From that moment, I never considered straying from this creative path. Instead, I dedicated myself to crafting daily, honing my skills with precision.
Between 1999 and 2008, I embraced the world of freelancing. Later, I made the move to Los Angeles, joining Iconisus L&Y, one of the top motion picture advertising agencies in the city. Over the course of my tenure, I designed over 5,000 movie and TV show posters. Subsequently, I transitioned to its sister agency, I Mean It, assuming the role of an executive creative director, where my focus shifted towards branding and traditional advertising – a discipline I honed for nearly a decade prior to my relocation to LA.
Since 2015, I’ve been the driving force behind Ozan Karakoc Design Studio, a creative house specializing in brand development, that includes a wide variety of services — from brand startegy to brand identity design, packaging design to UI/UX design, presentation design to video production and more. We empower brands to unlock their true potential through the marriage of strategy and design.
With bases in both Los Angeles, California and Brussels, Belgium, we have the privilege of working on a global canvas.
If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?
Let me happily tie my answer to your very first question. The first quality that I think is the most impactful in my journey is my work ethics. If I didn’t prioritize respecting my job, my clients and my business partners, I wouldn’t be where I am at this moment.
Another quality I find highly important is how passionate I have been for graphic design, all the time, from the very beginning. I never considered it as an opportunity to earn a living, or counted it as one of the areas I might have been interested in when I grew up. It was a passion deeply ingrained in me. Therefore, I enjoy every single design project I do, no matter how small, how big, how challenging it is. And that’s why I keep designing at the slowest times of the year.
Finally, ‘attention to detail’… While it may sound a bit like a cliche, it’s one of the key points for being a professional designer. I always take that extra step when I see a tiny little imperfection on the work. Sometimes it requires exporting the entire presentation again, and reuploading it to the server. Sometimes you need to get rid of that idea completely, and start over. But it is worth doing that.
So, my advice for young people who are at the beginning of their design careers, is this…
Be a responsible human being, make sure that you love what you’re doing, and always prioritize attention to detail and strive for excellence without becoming overly fixated.
How would you describe your ideal client?
Sometimes it’s underestimated, but there is a significant connection between good work and good client. Even if you’re the most talented designer in the world, with the wrong client, there is no way you can deliver exceptional results.
The ideal client is the one that knows what it’s doing, how it’s doing that, and why. If at least one of those are missing, you have to feel the urge to help them and complete the puzzle, with the power of strategy and design.
The ideal client has the willingness to listen to you, the expert. The best client-designer relationship is when both sides are striving to learn from each other. You learn about the client’s business, their field, their competition, customers, partners, employees, challenges, pain points and more, while they learn from you the process of branding, strategy, marketing, design and such.
You respect them, they respect you, and the outcome is inevitably exceptional.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.ozankarakoc.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ozan_karakoc/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ozankarakocdesign
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ozankarakoc/
