What a credit line teaches you

In the Turkish advertising trade every piece of work travels with a künye: a short block that names the client, the agency, the creative director, the art director, the copywriter, the year. It appears on award entries, in trade press, at the bottom of case studies. It is a credit line, but it is also a small act of accountability. If the work is bad, the künye says who to ask.

I have kept the habit on this site. Every project here carries its client, sector, year, role and scope, in the same place, in the same order. Partly that is for the reader, who deserves to know what they are looking at. Partly it is for me.

The line changes the work

Something happens when you know your name will sit under a piece. You stop asking whether the client will accept it and start asking whether you would defend it in five years. Those are different questions and they produce different screens.

The künye also keeps you honest about roles. “Art director” and “designed everything” are not the same claim. On a large banking project I might own the visual system and one flow while another team owns the rest; the line should say so. Portfolios that blur this are easy to spot and hard to trust.

A discipline worth exporting

Product teams do not have a künye culture. Features ship, screens change, and a year later nobody can say who decided that the balance should be grey. I think that is a loss. Not for the credit, but for the memory: the reasoning behind a decision lives with the person who made it, and when the name is gone, the reasoning usually goes too.

So: write the line. Client, year, role, what you actually did. It takes thirty seconds and it makes you a slightly better designer every time.