My relationship with Travego Firada began with a website, travego.org, which I founded during my third year of university to connect bus travel enthusiasts. This, of course, requires me to recount my first encounter with a Travego.
I believe it was a rainy day, and I was waiting for my bus to Ankara at the Mezitli branch of Mersin Vif. A small, trifold brochure for the new, first-generation Travego caught my eye in the waiting room. I wondered if I would ever travel to Ankara in one of these new buses. A few days later, İlhan Ağaçlı, the owner of the transportation company at the time, gave me a framed poster, a promotional item featuring a metallic bus against a black background. That poster hung on my wall for a long time, both in Mersin and later in my Ankara home.
My first Travego journeys, between Mersin, Ankara, Istanbul, and Izmir, inspired me to create the website. I was working at the time, and the morning after a round trip to Ankara on a pearl white, Turkish-market-specific Travego 17 SHD (license plate 68DS266 – I’ll never forget it), I registered the domain.
Travego became a wonderful travel companion, and I met many people thanks to it. In fact, the primary reason I decided to relaunch the communication surrounding this event, in a modern format for its 20th anniversary, was that it facilitated my meeting with the Mercedes team, which may have been the first time I earned money in a meaningful way.
In 2008, I traveled to the Mercedes-Benz Hoşdere Marketing center in Istanbul with a friend, and that’s where I met the Mercedes-Benz bus marketing communication team. They were incredibly welcoming, listened to our ideas, and provided all the support they could at the time. Though most of the team members have moved on to other roles, we’ve remained in contact.
You might remember the forums. We created one for travego.org, and intercity bus photos were a shared passion. We held competitions, trying to spot and photograph newly commissioned buses, vying for the “honor” of being the first to capture them. When someone mentioned "Travego Firarda" in the forum, I checked it out on Facebook, which I used extensively then, and that's how I was first introduced to the event.
AI-powered brand / band name design
For a comprehensive design, I first needed a band image. Initially, I considered using an existing Turkish band, but realized this could potentially lead to problems down the road.
While this project could easily be labeled as fan art, existing bands all have established brand identities. It’s uncertain whether they would participate in such a creative endeavor, and they might simply decline. I could have chosen bands that had previously participated in the tour, but that would necessitate respecting their decisions about future involvement. Therefore, I opted for an AI-driven design approach, which has become increasingly prominent in our digital lives, especially since 2023.
"Frost & Sun" is both a band name and a brand that embodies contradiction. Having a good grasp of the current state of universities and the concept of spring festivals, particularly within a Mediterranean university context, I envisioned this concert featuring Mediterranean music, but performed by artists from more northern regions.
Consequently, I experimented with numerous queries across ChatGPT, Aria, CoPilot, and Gemini. The idea of juxtaposing "frost," meaning frozen water or ice in both Norwegian and English, with "sun," which melts ice and dispels cold, seemed compelling. ChatGPT provided a close approximation of this concept, which I then developed further.
AI-supported image design
We all understand that the musicians are as crucial as the music itself, and bands are typically recognized and marketed as a collective. Travego Firarda has toured with bands since its inception, and I wanted to maintain this tradition in the brand communication I developed for its 20th anniversary.
Instead of using existing photographs of people, I used various prompts with different AI engines to create the characters. Of all the images, only the Travego image originates from a real photo and expands within its own universe. Leonardo.ai and Google's Imagen3 text-to-image AI engines were the tools I employed for this stage, and the final characters were those generated by Imagen3.
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