/ Global
Global Branding & Marketing Agency · San Diego · Toronto · Dubai
A San Diego branding and marketing agency for American companies, and for the international brands entering the U.S. We turn strategy into identity, and identity into brands the world remembers.
What we do
Every agency has AI now. That's a baseline, not a difference. What matters is what the AI is working from. Designers build your brand here, by hand, and every market leaves with the file that holds its own tools inside it. The everyday work stays on brand without a designer in each office.
AI can assemble a logo in seconds. It can't decide what a brand should mean in a new market. Strategy, naming and identity are authored here, by hand, then documented so exactly that every office and every tool stays inside them.
SKILL.md, plus the evals that test it
AI made output cheap, which made sameness the default worldwide. We set the positioning, the voice and the idea worth having, then hand each market the rules to execute against without going off-brand.
Templates ship fast and look like everyone else's, in every language. Sites, motion and 3D are designed and built here, then handed over with the brand file, so what any team makes next still looks like you.
Startup app creation
We take a startup app from a sketch to every screen: the mark, the colors, a prototype you can tap, every screen and state, and the design system its developers build from. huddlie, a keepsake app for families, is how that looks in practice.
How we work
The shape of a standard engagement, wherever it runs. Scope moves the dates, never the order: nothing gets designed before we know what we are designing against, and nothing ships without the files that keep it right in every market.
Scroll to follow the timeline
We learn the business before anything gets drawn: what you sell, who buys it, what they are really choosing between, and where the current brand is costing you. We talk to your team, your customers and the people who do your selling.
Every real competitor pulled apart: their positioning, their visual codes, the claims the whole category repeats. We map what the market already expects, so we know exactly which of those rules are worth breaking.
How the brand has to behave where money actually changes hands: the shelf, the pitch, the search result, the first meeting. We write the one message that has to survive all four.
What the brand stands for, who it is for, and the archetype it plays. Signed off before a single visual is made, because everything after it is built to serve this one decision.
Everything gathered so far gets read together, and the patterns in it become directions worth drawing. Then the part that looks like nothing and decides everything: brainstorming, and sketching by hand, fast and in quantity, so the weak ideas are found early and cheaply.
The sketches that survived are built properly. A small number of distinct concepts, each one a real answer to the positioning rather than a variation on the same thought, taken far enough that you can judge it honestly.
Once the direction is chosen, it gets applied to the places it will actually live: the email signature, the website landing page, the business card, the social post. We keep adjusting it against those until it stops looking like a logo and starts looking like the brand.
We pick a date together as soon as the concepts are running, and hold a few options either side of it so the room can be the right room. This is where the work is walked through end to end, in person or on a call, before anyone starts revising it.
Your notes, worked through properly rather than patched over. We change what needs changing, say so when a request would cost more than it gains, and take the direction back through the same applications so nothing quietly breaks on the way.
Everything gets made production ready: logo files in every format, email signatures, banners, social post templates, website assets and the print artwork. Named, organized and handed over so your team can find what it needs without asking us.
There is always something needed or forgotten. This is the week we do those. The small corrections, the one extra size, the file somebody realizes they need that Friday, all closed off before the project is called done.
What you leave with
The first group ships on every branding engagement. The second is scoped to what you actually need, and priced with the project rather than assumed into it.
Weighing up a rebrand, or want a straight second opinion on work in progress? Write to the person who would do it.
akin.tangun@adworks.ca ↗Who writes your brand skill
Guidelines describe how a brand looks. A designer fills in the rest from experience. A model has none to fill it with, so the judgment has to be written down.
A designer who has never shipped code writes a beautiful PDF no tool can read. An engineer who has never built a brand writes a clean file with no judgment in it. The brand skill comes from doing both, which is also why these two sites are hand coded rather than assembled.
Delivered with every project
Your identity ships as a SKILL.md: frontmatter so an agent loads it by description rather than on being told, the rules in plain Markdown, and usage limits written as constraints rather than suggestions. It lives in version control, so brand changes arrive as reviewable diffs. The evals ship with it, test cases asserting what correct output looks like, so a model upgrade or a careless prompt fails a run instead of reaching production.
Model-agnostic by design. Copilot, ChatGPT Enterprise, Claude or Gemini: the file outlives whichever one your company standardizes on this year.
--- name: adworks-brand description: ADWORKS color, type and usage rules. Load for any ADWORKS asset, post, slide or page. --- ## Color teal #00bbaf Branding blue #00aeef Digital purple #9e63b9 Marketing ink #1c1a1b Text ## Type display Fraunces body/ui Archivo ## Usage - Wordmark: light grey on dark, dark on light - Service color follows the discipline, never decoration - Headlines in display, everything else in body
The skill, the guidelines and every file we make for you arrive in your own client portal, so they never get lost. See the client portal ↓
Your client portal
No attachments to dig out of an inbox, no expired download links, no “can you resend the logo?” Every client gets a private portal on our site with everything we have delivered, always in its latest version. Log in whenever you need it, or give the password to whoever needs the files.
Switched AI tools?
Download the brand skill again. Your new agent follows the same rules from its first request.
Moved to a new server?
Download the website. The latest files are always there.
Lost your laptop?
Log in from the new one. Everything is where you left it.
New designer starting Monday?
Send them the password. The brand guidelines are waiting for them.
Case study · Miller Advisors
A pricing consultancy that came to us with a pixelated mark in colours that did not work for them. We redrew it, gave it new colours, a logotype and a typeface, and a way to protect it once the work started being made by software. Their guidelines and their brand skill are now generated from one source, so the rules a designer reads and the rules an agent follows are the same rules.
8icons 16colors 2press files 11/11behavior tests passed
Every agency adopted AI. Very few hand you the file, and the tests, that keep your brand in line once they leave the room. Start a project ↗
Selected work
From a luxury clinic in Dubai to interactive experiences for global icons and brands sold across continents. Roles and partners credited as delivered.
A keepsake app for families, branded from a crayon sketch and designed screen by screen: the mark, a clickable prototype, 86 screens in light and dark, and a design system its developers build from.
Role: App Branding · UI/UX Design · Screen Kit · Design System
Read the case study ↗
A large-screen configurator experience: model, color and wheel selection explored in real-time 3D.
Role: Visual Concept · 3D Animation
With: Commersive
Real-size, immersive 3D product presentation and interactive feature showcase.
Role: Visual Concept · 3D Animation
With: Commersive
A premium clinic brand created from the name up: the name, the M, the colors, the uniforms, and one system that keeps its Medical, Cosmetic and Relaxation divisions apart under one roof.
Role: Naming · Identity · Brand Architecture · Uniforms
Read the story ↗
A vintage-floral bath, body and home fragrance line: four scents, one ornate label, gift boxes made to be unwrapped.
Role: Concept · Illustration · Packaging
For: Hunter Amenities
One family, two connected brands in Nova Scotia: a developer and the builder behind its communities. We designed both websites, each with its own voice, both clearly related.
Role: Website Design · Two Brands
View the project ↗
A complete corporate identity and website for an IT & cybersecurity firm. The founder credits us with creating both the brand and its digital home.
Role: Brand Identity · Corporate · Website
View the project ↗
A restaurant brand built from the name up: identity, packaging, signage, menus, social, an animated logo and a responsive 3D website. The founder credits us with creating the business name itself, then the world around it.
Role: Naming · Brand Identity · Packaging · Signage · Digital & 3D
View the project ↗About ADWORKS
ADWORKS began as two agencies. Didem Lutwak ran one in California. Her cousin Akin Tangun ran the other in Toronto. In 2023 they merged them into one creative agency, with the U.S. business led from San Diego and the creative work led from Toronto.
The name is the two of them: A for Akin, D for Didem, at work. ADWORKS.
Didem Lutwak & Akin TangunThe A and the D in ADWORKS
Co-Founder & Brand Executive
Leadership · United States
Co-Founder · Brand Executive · San Diego
The best brands aren't lucky. They're aimed.
Didem co-founded ADWORKS and leads the company's U.S. business from San Diego. A professional archer who competed at the Olympic Games, with a bachelor's degree in design, she brings a competitor's precision to brand strategy and client leadership. On every U.S. engagement she owns the relationship, the strategy and the outcome, working hand in hand with Creative Director Akin Tangun.
AI took the cost out of producing marketing. Any company can now publish more ads, emails and posts than its customers will ever read, and plenty do. Volume stopped being an advantage the day it became free.
What is scarce now is aim: knowing who you are for, what you promise them and what you will never say. That is strategy, and people still decide it. On every U.S. engagement Didem settles it first, then lets the tools do the volume inside those lines.
For American companies, and for international brands entering the U.S., the result is marketing that sounds like one company everywhere it appears.
Creative direction · Canada
Co-Founder · Creative Director · Toronto
AI made average work free. Original work just became worth more.
Akin leads the creative work at ADWORKS from Toronto. He has spent more than 25 years building brands, among them the years he was Chief of Design at Hayat Group, and he both draws and codes.
Our Creative Branding Blog
Every QR code does the same job. Ours does it while drawing San Diego, Dubai and Toronto into one horizon. Every module that carries the link is also a building. Same function, a code no one else could use.
Wouldn't you rather hand over something that looks different, and more elegant, than everyone else in the room? Read the post ↗ Visit the blog
Let's build something that lasts
Tell us about the brand you're building, whether it's made for the American market or headed beyond it. We'll bring the strategy, the craft and 25 years of judgment.
Where we are
Home of ADWORKS Global, leading branding and marketing for U.S. and international clients.
Any question that is not a new project, or a creative who would like to work with us? hello@adworksglobal.com
Home of ADWORKS Canada, where Akin Tangun leads the creative work.
Any question that is not a new project, or a creative who would like to work with us? hello@adworks.ca
Opening soon
Until we open, our U.S. team in San Diego is the contact for potential work in the region.
Talk to the U.S. team: hello@adworksglobal.com
