Background
Istanbul Elsewhere is the world’s largest meyhane (“Meyhane” means house of wine and is composed of two Persian words: mey (wine) and khāneh (house). In Turkey Meyhane is sort of tavern where people gather to drink raki and converse). It came to life as a follow-on event to the pop-up meyhane’s that were started before the pandemic.
Pandemic gave this event a whole new meaning by bringing together Turks from all over the world for the love raki and storytelling.
Process
We wanted to create a playful, dynamic brand that can be easily recognisable on digital platforms and be applied to Instagram posts as Instagram which is where Istanbul Elsewhere connects with their main target audience.
Results
The new brand is dynamic. The idea of the logo’s ‘elsewhere’ being dynamic was inspired by the fact that, this event or group has no one place that they exist. They are online, and they have their founders and attendees all over the world. The whole idea of the event is to bring ‘Istanbul’ to wherever you (the audience) are. We then used the the logotype as a bracket to emphasise the little moments of istanbul.
Illustrations
Having photographs to remind people of Istanbul was very challenging especially in Istanbul, so created warm illustrations in order to re-create the memories of the Istanbul culture.
These illustrations were used at the events as backgrounds, posts on social media and invitation events and soon became trademark of the brand. When we tested images vs illustrations on social media, we have observed that people were responding and engaging to illustration posts more than any other post.
