Oz Gultekin

About

A bit of context

Hey, thanks for being here.

I’m Oz Gultekin, a Product Experience Designer based in Montreal, Canada.

I grew up in İstanbul, a city where history leans against the future and daily life unfolds between continents. That friction shaped how I see the world.

My creative path started with an 8-bit computer and the pixelated poetry of the demosceneUnderground digital art scene where programmers produced real-time audiovisual demos as technical showcases, peaking on the Commodore 64 and other 8-bit machines., long before content became currency. I studied design, then spent over a decade building digital products that respect how people actually work, not just how systems want them to.

Moving between continents rewired how I think and create. Navigating cultures where different languages and ways of being intersect taught me to work between expressiveness and quiet, improvisation and structure. That blend shows up in everything I make.

When I’m not designing, I hoard typefaces, write short film screenplays that won’t be shot, and travel whenever I can, always chasing the next horizon. As a devoted follower of soccer and its drama, I’m a Beşiktaşİstanbul football club founded 1903, oldest in Türkiye, known for its fiercely working-class and loyal fanbase. fan through and through and support FC St. PauliHamburg soccer club known for its anti-fascist, anti-commercial politics as much as for its play..

This space leans toward the slower web. The kind that remembers when sharing thoughts felt natural. It doesn’t chase headlines. Instead, it lingers on patterns. How tools shape behaviour, how old ideas resurface, how the things we automate reveal what we value.

No algorithms. No data harvesting.
No ads. Just content, shared on my terms.

Beyond this space, I share shorter thoughts on Bluesky, drop fediverse notes on Mastodon, and publish tech hot takes on Peerlist for a builder audience. I also post on Medium, for careless essays. For professional context, I’m on LinkedIn. There’s also a design portfolio, corporate parts behind a password, if you’d like to see my product experience design work up close. I also keep a link in bio around, a phone-screen style hub of the essentials, just in case.

If anything here resonates, the tea jar is always open. I’m glad you stopped by. Thank you.

PS: If you have a question, swing by Contact. If you have feedback, send it my way.

Aesthetics

The Bauhaus idealThe 1919 German school's belief that form follows function and art should serve society. sits at the center of how I see the made world: simplicity and efficiency, art that meets the needs of society, no distinction between form and function, no ornamentation for its own sake. Design earns its place by working. In painting, I keep returning to the Impressionists. Paul Cézanne's planes, Camille Pissarro's light, Charles-François Daubigny's still rivers. Marc Chagall and Joan Miró for the dreamlike logic. Rembrandt van Rijn, Diego Velázquez, and Edward Hopper for everything they say about light and solitude.

Reads

Books that unsettle tend to stay. George Orwell's 1984 and Joseph Heller's Catch-22 shaped how I read power and absurdity. Anton Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard still reads truer than most things written since. I return often to John Fowles, Chuck Palahniuk, Nick Hornby, and Alain de Botton, writers who take ordinary life seriously without making it precious. Noam Chomsky keeps me calibrated. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe keeps me honest.

Cinema

My taste runs wide. Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove, Jean-Luc Godard's Masculin Féminin, Woody Allen's Annie Hall, films that are fully, unapologetically themselves. Gadjo Dilo1997 Tony Gatlif film about a Frenchman searching for a Romani singer in a Romanian village. and Good Bye Lenin! for the warmth found in displacement. David Cronenberg's Videodrome for the dread. The Royal Tenenbaums, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and Lost in Translation for the particular ache they carry. Monty Python and This Is Spinal Tap because absurdity is its own art form.

Series

Television raised me badly and I'm grateful for it. MASH, Herbie, Knight Rider, Murder She Wrote, MacGyver, Perfect Strangers, Married with Children, Quantum Leap, Seinfeld. The formative years. A soft spot for British television above anything else. Coupling, Peep ShowBritish sitcom shot from characters' POV with running inner monologues, 2003-15, a cornerstone of modern cringe comedy., Friday Night Dinner, Lovesick, Crashing, We Are Lady Parts, Riot Women, genuine and relatable in a way that rarely travels but always lands.

Gaming

I grew up on Command & Conquer Red Alert, Warcraft II, and Sid Meier's Civilization, strategy games that rewarded patience and punished overconfidence. Theme Hospital and Pizza Tycoon for the management itch. Prehistorik 2 and Atomic Bomberman for chaos in a small room. SWOS 96-97Sensible World of Soccer 96-97, a top-down Amiga/DOS football game famed for depth in tiny sprites. remains the greatest football game ever made. Counter-Strike and Battlefield for the multiplayer years. FIFA and CM/FM for the ones that never really end. Cyberpunk 2077.

Music

Music for me spans more ground than makes sense on paper. Claude Debussy, Erik Satie, and Richard Wagner on one end. Bauhaus, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Love and Rockets, and Echo & The Bunnymen somewhere in the middle. Kraftwerk and Karl Bartos for the architecture of electronic sound, Wax Tailor and Trentemøller for the texture of it. Pink Floyd, Dio, and the whole NWOBHMNew Wave of British Heavy Metal, the late-70s movement that birthed Iron Maiden, Def Leppard and Saxon. and 90s heavy metal canon for the sheer weight. Wu-Tang Clan and Rage Against the Machine for the aggression with something to say. Andrew Bird, Michelle GurevichCanadian-Russian chanson singer whose smoky, half-spoken songs sound like a lost Soviet film score., Warhaus, Balthazar, and KhruangbinHouston trio blending Thai funk, dub, and Middle Eastern psychedelia, almost always instrumental. when the mood calls for something slower and stranger. The Black Keys and Kaiser Chiefs when it doesn't. Psychedelic funk and synth punk fill the gaps. Big John Patton holds everything together.

Sports

Sport at its best is about character under pressure. Abebe BikilaEthiopian marathon runner who won Rome 1960 barefoot, the first Black African Olympic gold medalist. running barefoot through Rome to win gold is still the greatest underdog story ever told. Brian Clough and John Benjamin Toshack for proving that conviction matters more than resources. I was rooting for the Phoenix Suns in the 1993 NBA Finals and never quite got over it. Allen IversonPhiladelphia 76ers guard and 11-time NBA All-Star, played a brief late-career stint at Beşiktaş in 2010-11. and Jason Williams for playing with a kind of freedom the sport rarely allows. Les FerdinandEnglish striker associated with QPR, Newcastle and Tottenham, with a 1988-89 loan spell at Beşiktaş. and Atiba HutchinsonCanadian midfielder and national-team captain, a Beşiktaş mainstay from 2013 to 2023., both players who gave everything the game asked. Gabriela Sabatini and Roger Federer for grace under competition. Mika Häkkinen for dignity in a sport that doesn't always reward it.