Hi
My name is Ekin Ergok. I'm a creative director, brand designer and illustrator working primarily across hospitality, fashion and culture. For more than twelve years, my work has moved between visual identity, illustration, typography, packaging, print, digital design and the physical details that bring a brand into the real world.
Hospitality and art have always been the two constants in my life. I’ve been drawing for as long as I can remember, and I feel very lucky that the work I do today brings together the things I have always been drawn to most: design, food, music, fashion, interiors and the way people experience a place.
I was born in Izmir and grew up in Istanbul in a home where culture was always a mixture of things rather than one particular influence. A normal day could start with George Benson, move into Buena Vista Social Club in the afternoon, and end somewhere between Fatboy Slim, Andy Williams, David Bowie, Baris Manco and Dr. Dre. The first film I watched on VHS was The Blues Brothers, which I watched twelve times in one week. The first CDs I bought were The Prodigy’s The Fat of the Land, Meat Loaf’s Bat Out of Hell and Queen’s Greatest Hits.
I think that mix stayed with me. I never really learned to separate things into neat categories, and I still approach design in much the same way. Something can be elegant and funny at the same time. A very structured identity can sit next to an imperfect hand-drawn illustration. A restaurant can feel established without feeling old. I like those contrasts, and I think a lot of my work lives somewhere between them.
My education followed a similarly indirect path. I studied music, percussion, art and restoration before eventually focusing on graphic design, with time spent at Hacettepe University State Conservatory, Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University, Wellington College in England, Palazzo Spinelli in Florence and later Pratt Institute in New York. Music gave me an early understanding of rhythm and composition, while restoration taught me to pay attention to materials, craft and small details. I did not know at the time that any of those things would become part of how I work as a designer, but they did.
Hospitality entered my life just as naturally.
Most of my summers while I was studying were spent working in restaurants. I started as a busboy and gradually worked my way into management. Later came years of DJing with 2GET4!, nightlife and putting together pop-up events of my own. I would design the posters and invitations, but I was just as interested in what people were drinking, what was playing, how the room felt and whether all of those things belonged together.
Eventually I co-founded and ran Union 22 in Istanbul, a restaurant, bar, gallery and retail concept that brought food, art, music, fashion and design into the same space. I designed the identity and much of the physical experience myself, while also being involved in the everyday reality of running a hospitality business.
That experience changed the way I thought about design.
It taught me that a restaurant identity does not really live in a brand guideline. It lives in someone’s hands and in the room around them. It is the menu they open before dinner, the sign they notice from across the street, the matchbook they put in their pocket, the plate under the food, the embroidery on a napkin, the music, the lighting and the small detail they remember the next morning.
I have always liked the idea that you eat with your eyes first. For me, that starts well before the food arrives.
When I moved to New York with my wife Gizem and our dog Naomi, the relationship between design and hospitality became an even bigger part of my life and work. New York was home for nearly a decade and shaped the way I think about restaurants, hotels, nightlife and cultural spaces. It is a city where food, fashion, art, architecture and people constantly overlap, and I found myself increasingly working with clients who approached hospitality in that same way.
Over the years, I have worked on visual identities and brand experiences for restaurants, hotels, bars and private clubs including The Mercer, The Corner Store, OR’ESH, Cafe Charmant, Zero Bond, Sartiano’s, The Brooklyn Mirage, Pearl Box and Bagatelle, alongside hospitality projects in New York, Miami, Los Angeles, St. Tropez, Saint-Barthélemy, Grenada and elsewhere.
My work with &LANA has been an important part of that journey. It has given me the opportunity to work closely with founders, operators, chefs, architects and creative teams from the earliest stages of a concept. Over time, it has become very natural for me to move between helping shape an idea, guiding a team and developing the work myself. On the same project I might be thinking about the overall creative direction in the morning, drawing an illustration in the afternoon and adjusting the technical details of a menu, storefront or piece of packaging later that day.
I like being close to the work.
I still draw. I care probably too much about the spacing between two letters in a logo. I want to know what paper a menu will be printed on, how a coaster feels in your hand, whether an embroidery will hold a particular line weight, and how a sign will look from the opposite side of the street. Those details may seem small individually, but together they are often what makes a place feel considered.
Sometimes that means something restrained and typographic. Sometimes it means illustration, unusual materials, custom objects or a sense of humor. Often it is a combination of all of those things. What matters to me is that the final result feels specific to the place and to the people behind it.
Today I am based between Paris and New York and continue to work internationally.
In the end, whether I am designing a restaurant, hotel, fashion brand or something entirely different, I am interested in the same thing: building a world around an idea and making every part of it feel like it belongs there.