Rarely by accident
There’s always a reason, and it’s usually a human one. I’m Sufyan, a strategist, and finding it is my favourite part of the job.
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I look for the small, true thing inside a big problem, then turn it into strategy people actually respond to.
Brand, creative and performance strategy, shaped by a designer’s eye and a habit of asking one more question. Here’s how I learned to look.
Frankfurt
I was born in Frankfurt, in a country that takes its typography seriously. Shop signs, street signs, the lettering on a bakery window. I couldn’t stop looking at them, and asking why one felt trustworthy and another didn’t.
At home
German first, Turkish alongside it, English every day and Spanish still in progress. Growing up between languages taught me early that the same words can mean quite different things to different people. It’s still most of my job.
Go on, play something.
Sixteen years
I’ve played for sixteen years and still write songs. Music taught me to listen for the thing underneath, which turns out to be useful in a client meeting too.
Teenage years
As a teenager I’d stand in the supermarket wondering why the boxes looked the way they did, and whether they could look much better. So I started making things. I designed channel banners for YouTubers, and a few of them travelled much further than I expected.
Still at school
I built a little online shop while I was still in school, and people I’d never met started ordering. That was when I thought, maybe I should actually study this.
Order no. 0001
Shop
001Central Saint Martins, King’s Cross
Getting into Central Saint Martins took a lot of work and a lot of applying. I studied Graphic Communication Design, with tutors and mentors who changed how I think, and found myself drawn more and more to design for social good. I worked on projects about democracy and the social contract, shaped partly by Minouche Shafik’s What We Owe Each Other.
Graduation project, 2023
A workshop for students on the social contract and what a fairer society might ask of all of us. Twenty-nine cards and three exercises built on reflective questions, with a visual identity borrowed from political campaigns to give it weight. I tested it with students and saw people with very different views begin to understand each other.
Along the way
Chairs, posters, books and fashion photography. Mostly self-initiated, mostly to find out how something works.
Bridging Ventures, from my first year at university
In my first year of university I joined Bridging Ventures, working on design with organisations such as the UN Climate Change Conference and the Obama Foundation. It showed me how much design and strategy can achieve when the stakes are high.
How do you bring people with very different views into the same conversation?
Grounded Conversations, Bridging Ventures
I worked on Grounded Conversations, an online mini-series of five twelve-minute episodes on how we actually change things. Each one paired a long interview with an established expert, including the economist Kate Raworth on Doughnut Economics, with responses from people doing the work on the ground, across different regions, ages and industries. Animated breakdowns, plain-English definitions and a reading list made complex systems easier to follow, and the series was shown in Bridging Ventures’ space at COP26.
Grounded Conversations
Five episodes, twelve minutes each
Independent clients, alongside university
I also worked directly with independent businesses. For Maison Tombo, a homeware brand run from Bali by a French founder, I built the full e-commerce strategy and the website. For Curious Kudu, a gallery on Queens Road in Peckham, I led the organic growth, from the website to social, and helped turn it from somewhere people walked past into somewhere they came to. Working closely with small teams showed me how much strategy matters when every decision sits close to the customer.
Influence Digital
I joined Influence Digital as a Creative Strategist, and one of my first clients was YouTube. The brief was the in-app screens that appear when people open YouTube, inviting them to try Premium. Persuading people to pay for something they already use for free is a genuinely interesting problem.
It was also a first for YouTube: a test of geo-specific localisation. We built localised routes for the UK, Germany and Turkey, two of them cultures I know from the inside, so the same offer could feel native in each market rather than translated.
Your music, without the breaks.
Ohne Werbung. Einfach weiterschauen.
Reklamsız izle, keyfini çıkar.
From there I progressed to Senior Creative Strategist, working with museums, archives and public sector campaigns along the way.
ID Labs
I founded ID Labs, an internal think tank focused on how the agency could work better, adapt to change and grow. It showed me that strategy is just as valuable inside a business as outside it.
Precis Digital, since 2025
Today I lead creative strategy for The Guardian and Oner Active, partner closely with Google, Meta and Reddit, and run strategic frameworks workshops for the wider team.
What I care about
Fairness, opportunity and compassion, and the conversations that get us there.
Every brief is about people. I want to understand them properly before saying anything about them.
Say the true thing, simply and kindly. If a strategy can’t be explained plainly, it isn’t finished.
People are busy and doing their best. Good work makes their lives a little easier, not louder.
I’m drawn to work that widens access, to education, to opportunity, to a fair hearing.
Beyond the brief, I mentor young creatives with the Creative Mentor Network, lecture at UAL and teach music on Saturdays.
Five projects, each one a hard question that turned into a clear idea. Open any of them for the full story.
Brands and institutions I’ve worked with
The Guardian, YouTube, Oner Active, Science Museum, The Design Museum, British Council, The National Archives, Columbia Climate School, Counter Terrorism Policing, Cozmo, Curious Kudu, Maison Tombo, The Twenty Two and Kiddylicious.
Four things I’m good at, and where I’ve done them.
Positioning, platforms and creative territories built on real audience insight. For when a brand knows what it does, but not yet why people should care.
Always-on creative engines for paid social and beyond. Testing frameworks, briefing systems and production rhythms that keep work fresh and efficient.
Research into how people really think, feel and behave, turned into clear hypotheses a team can test and act on.
Hands-on sessions that help teams think more clearly together, from framing a problem to building an argument that leads with the answer.
Better conversations make a fairer world.
Contact
I’m open to strategy roles, projects, workshops and talks, and always up for a good conversation.
I came across Curious Kudu by chance, an independent gallery on Queens Road in Peckham, and got talking to Chris, the owner. We found we had the same picture of what it could become, and he brought me on board to help get it there.
The art and the space were already strong. The problem was that most people walked straight past. The aim was to turn it into a destination, somewhere people made a point of visiting.
A place people come to, not a place they pass.
I led the gallery’s organic growth: its website, social strategy and brand voice. That meant building a calm, editorial look for Instagram, planning monthly art and culture content, and making every exhibition opening something worth showing up for.
I worked on countless openings, capturing them and turning them into stories, and interviewed artists for a series called Five Questions, giving people a reason to care about the work before they’d even seen it.
Five Questions with Isobel Finlay, one of the artist interview series.
Organic reach grew significantly, website traffic rose sharply and gallery nights were packed. Curious Kudu became somewhere people came to on purpose, which was exactly the goal.
I worked with the gallery until the space changed direction, becoming a smaller service and dining venue. It remains one of the projects I’m proudest of, because the results were visible in the room.
Maison Tombo is a small homeware brand, run from Bali by a French founder, selling hand-selected objects: ceramics, vessels, textiles and furniture. It is deliberately quiet. The founder wanted the pieces to speak for themselves, without clutter or over-explanation, and for customers to come to their own conclusions.
The challenge was to turn that into a business that sells online, without losing the restraint that made it special.
Humble piece, treasured beauty.
I built Maison Tombo’s full e-commerce strategy and designed its website, from positioning and market insight through to the photography brief and social plan.
I started by mapping comparable curated homeware shops in the UK, how they positioned themselves, their price ranges, from around £30 to £1,500, and how they used Instagram alongside their own sites to sell. That showed where Maison Tombo could stand apart: less trend-led, more considered, closer to the story of each object.
Because the brand says so little, the images have to do most of the work. I wrote a photography and content brief built on natural, twilight-like contrast: soft morning or late-afternoon light, imperfect alignment, generous negative space, gentle colour and only a discreet human presence.
It defined two types of image. Item Profile shows a product clearly on a plain background, with around four angles per piece and some grouped compositions. Item in Use shows the object at home, tea being poured or a textile folded over a sofa, so people can picture it in their own space.
A website, e-commerce strategy and visual system that let a very small brand sell online with the same calm as its objects. The brief gave every shoot a clear standard, so the shop, the product pages and social all feel like one considered place.
A social contract is the unwritten deal between people and the state they live in. We give up some freedoms and follow the rules, and in return we expect protection and fair treatment. It shapes almost everything, yet most young people are never asked what they think it should say.
And the old one is under strain. More and more people are calling for a new social contract, for four reasons.
Technology, globalisation and the climate crisis have changed the world since the mid-twentieth-century deal was struck.
The gap between rich and poor keeps widening, and with it the sense that basic rights aren’t shared equally.
People are increasingly divided along political, social and cultural lines.
People want more transparency, accountability and a real say in decisions.
What do we owe each other, and what do we expect back?
A workshop that lets students build a social contract together. Twenty-nine cards guide them through three exercises, each built on simple, reflective questions. What do you give your government? What does it give you? What do your teachers want from you?
The method draws on Transformative Learning Theory, the idea that new information can genuinely change how we see things. The first exercise asks about the present, the second about the future people want, and the third asks them to reflect on what they’ve found, together.
The name comes from the first three words of the United States Constitution. “We the people” turns a vague idea of “the public” into “us”, a shared will and a sense of ownership.
The look borrows from American election campaigns, the most familiar and most polarising political imagery in Western culture. In a classroom, that does something useful. It feels nothing like a worksheet, and it tells students they’re being taken seriously, as adults with a stake in how things work.
I tested a lot of versions. Capitals felt intimidating and unapproachable. A stacked serif felt static and generic. The final mark is a lowercase serif, serious but warm, with a line that lifts upwards through it, a small sign of positive change. Yellow for the sun, blue for the sky.
I started by asking people a simple question, who is design for? The answers ranged from “me” to “the world”, which revealed a lot about how differently we see our responsibility to each other.
I also mapped how the cards could reach people: through schools and teachers with public funding, through NGO workshops for mixed-age and marginalised groups, and as a free digital download anyone can use. Together, the three routes make it as accessible as possible.
I ran the workshop with students, first in trials and then with the finished cards. It gave them space to understand each other’s views on what we owe one another, and it remains the project that best captures why I do this work.
News AppNews without the noise.
FeastDinner, rescued.
Two apps, each with its own story to tell. The News App offers a calm, trusted way to stay informed at a time when people want news that fits their lives, and in the US it brings a distinctive, independent voice. Feast brings the Guardian’s recipes into everyday kitchens, at a moment when people are looking for practical help with weeknight cooking.
The brief was to build on that strength and show, in the feed, the everyday moments where each app earns its place on someone’s phone.
People don’t keep an app because it’s impressive. They keep it because it helps on a Tuesday.
I developed a twelve-month creative strategy to broaden what Guardian advertising could look like, while keeping the editorial authority people trust it for. The research was clear: app audiences respond to things that are useful, shown in use and easy to build into a habit.
The centrepiece was a new creator strategy, with real people showing the products in use, in a lo-fi style native to the feed. For Feast, briefs built around dinner rescue, hands in frame, a plan for the week and a visible sense of relief. For the News App, news without the noise, a calmer way to stay informed, with Audio and Puzzles as small, rewarding resets in the day.
Alongside it, I evolved the always-on work, so the team now builds families of concepts around specific audience needs, and a shared creative scorecard means every brief is reviewed against the same criteria.
A steady engine, seasonal moments and quick tests, all at once, so creator ideas are always being tried against the classics.
A creator-led video challenge became one of the strongest performers in the programme, with a noticeable improvement in cost per install.
Testing also clarified the role of each format:
| Format | Its job | Where |
|---|---|---|
| Creator video | Curiosity, stopping the scroll | Top of the funnel |
| Product demo | Proof, showing it working | Middle |
| Static utility ad | Bringing in real subscribers | Bottom |
The result is a year-round creative system, with clear roles for discovery, proof and conversion. Specific results are confidential.
The shiftStop shooting a collection. Start shooting a story.
Oner Active has a strong programme of athlete-led UGC, beautifully polished studio photography and a loyal, engaged community. The opportunity was to build on that foundation and turn it into an always-on creative engine for paid social.
The aim was more distinct stories and modular assets from every shoot, a steady rhythm for testing, and creative that drives growth all year round, alongside the excitement of each launch.
Stop shooting a collection. Start shooting a story.
The studio shoots already set a high bar for the brand. I reframed them around shooting a narrative rather than a collection, so the same studio day could become a steady source of performance creative, without extra shoots.
I also introduced a copy framework built on persona, desire and awareness, so the message and the customer’s hesitations shape what gets photographed, rather than copy being added to finished images.
Every asset was given a clear role. UGC provides the authentic, scroll-stopping hook and social proof, while studio work builds desire and shows product proof. Because platforms treat near-identical ads as the same ad, the variety had to be genuine, across story, format and framing.
A paid studio checklist for photographers, so every shoot captures what performance needs alongside the brand imagery.
A full-funnel creative roadmap and playbook to power paid acquisition for Q4 and beyond, with a monthly refresh cycle and paid requirements built into every creative brief. It gives the brand a planned, repeatable creative engine, with every month building on the last.
Splendour and science weren’t opposites there. They fed each other.
People lean in when they’re curious, and lean back when they’re lectured.
3.48M
268K
£2.43
People pass ideas on through people.
An Instagram carousel, three slides from question to journal.
1M+
High-quality traffic continued well after the paid campaign ended. See the full project