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One mark for a nine-piece reggae band in Ankara — drawn to survive both a business card and an eight-metre LED wall behind a live set.
Client
Goril — reggae band, Ankara.
Role
Sole designer. Wordmark, symbol, colour pairings, photo treatment.
Scope
Deliberately small — one logo, no guidelines document. The band applied it themselves from there on.
A reggae band in Ankara has a specific problem: the genre's visual language is Jamaican, and none of it is theirs.
Eight Turkish musicians playing reggae could easily end up wearing someone else's flag. I wanted a mark that read as reggae to anyone in the room, without borrowing imagery the band had no claim to — and that stayed readable in Turkish, with the dotted İ intact rather than anglicised into GORIL.
Their own name gave me the way out. Goril is simply the Turkish word for gorilla — a literal, slightly funny name. So the mark leans on the animal and the hand, not on the flag.
The real test came free: the band put it on an LED wall, lit it magenta and blue, and stood eight people in front of it. It still read from the back of the room.
