“Evdeki Yaratıcılar” – Creators at Home, brings together new discoveries with former guests, focusing on the creative processes, inspiration and personal stories of artists and designers in the period of pandemic and social isolation.
The sixth guest of the series is Okan Usta. Okan is a hybrid creative who comes from an art direction background but operates both as a writer and art director for all mediums with a special love for TV and integrated.
He began his career at the age of 17 working as a cartoonist for several notable magazines. He studied visual communication design at Mimar Sinan Fina Arts University in Istanbul. He received both his bachelors and masters degrees from MSU.
He landed his first advertising job at a local agency where he worked as an art director for the Mercedes-Benz account. It was there that he realized that his unique cartoon/design background was the perfect trajectory for creating breakthrough advertising. He then joined DDB Istanbul and worked for two years on local and international brands before moving to New York City in 2005. In New York, he worked at Leo Burnett, Ogilvy and Droga5 over the course of 12 years. In 2017 he was hired by Wieden & Kennedy Shanghai as a CD where he leads a large team of creatives working on Nike, BMW and IKEA.
He has won several advertising and design awards including Cannes Lions, D&AD and One Show pencils, Clio and London International Awards. He was also named one of the top ten art directors globally by One Show in 2014 and served as a jury member for the Cannes Young Lions competition. Most recently his “Reactland” project for Nike garnered international attention and won the 2018 FWA People’s Choice Award.
You can check out the live Instagram event with Okan Usta on @atolye.io and @bigumigu accounts.