HELLO, I'M
Alara Degirmenci
Graphic Designer & Undergraduate Student at Yale University
A little bit about me
I am a Computing and the Arts major, who was born and riased in Istanbul, Turkey. At Yale, when I'm not enjoying the rare sunny weather on our beautiful campus with friends, you can find me at CEID doing crafts, 3D printing, and also sometimes studying. While I enjoys cooking and baking all kinds of stuff on my own when at home, when on campus I love to explore New Haven’s countless restaurants featuring the world’s cuisines and write reviews on my food blog, Chew Haven. She will also give up everything to discuss which ice cream shop is the best in New Haven. Outside of classes, I am the co-social chair of Float, a senator on the Yale College Council, a member of Kappa Alpha Theta sorority, and a member in the organizing team of YHack.
Rebranding Affectiva
Affectiva’s current logo, the smiley emoji, fails to create a unique brand identity as it is overly commonly used icon in everyday life, therefore making it for people to equate this visual mark with Affectiva as it already has many other existing connotations. Secondly, while making a proper reference to human faces and emotions, the current logo needs improvement in thoroughly representing the service Affective offers. Therefore, Affectiva needs a new logo that represents their core attributes including but not limited to innovation, analysis, emotions.
Logo Design
Bospherry
Logo Design
Born out of a in-class project, I designed a logo for the ferries that travel between the Asian and European sides of Istanbul, my hometown, as a way of transportation. While being a commute or a mere means of transportation for most of the passengers, the ferry ride offers arguably one of the best scenic routes in the world featuring the antique palaces and buildings of Istanbul. I wanted the logo to capture the tranquility most passengers associate with the ride as well as the notions directly related to the ferry such as connection and waves. The result was a relatively symmetric sequence of waves fading into the distance in two directions, inspired by the wake behind a ferry, and with a gap in between figuratively alluding to the strait of Bosphorus.
Hunger & Homelessness Action Week
Visual Identity Design
I teamed up with Yale Hunger and Homelessness Action Project to create a visual identity for their annual Hunger and Homelessness Action Week. The Action Week’s biggest component is the “FAST” project where Yale students donate their three dining hall swipes for the day. As the design team, our goal was to make as many Yale students as possible aware of this fundraising project and encourage them to donate their swipes. Using three of the organization’s main colors I designed visuals to be used as Facebook covers and Facebook Profile Frames.
To reflect the goal and nature of the organization, I mainly used organic shapes as well as simple icons that convey the mission of the organization in a straightforward way.
HELLO, I'M
Alara Değirmenci
Graphic Designer & Undergraduate Student at Yale University
EduCarter.com
Logo Design
My first logo design experience was for my junior year high school English teacher's personal website. I overheard him talking about that he needed a logo for his website, which he uses to share his class materials with his students as well as colleagues. Despite having no previous experience in logo design I wanted to take this on as a personal challenge and offered him to design a logo.
We spent the following weeks having meetings with him where he told me about his website's story, what it means to him, and what it aims to accomplish. Based on our meetings and the information he shared with me, I drafted sketches
Branford Pennant
At one of his visits to our weekly College Council meetings, the head of our residential college, Enrique De La Cruz mentioned the need for a new pennant design for our college. I volunteered to take on the project and started the process by looking at some sample college pennant designs. Most of them had simply the name of the college next to a college crest. I wanted my design to be more interesting and characteristic than that. So instead of using Branford's crest, I thought of other visuals that represented our college, and our magnificent Harkness Tower stood out to me as the visual mark I should use in this design. With intricate silhouette and long, narrow proportions, it was the perfect fit to complement the horizontal space occupied by the text.
The lower design on the right is for big scale productions of the pennant which will allow the details of the silhouette to be visible, while the upper one features a more simplistic design with less intricate details for small scale productions.
