Brand & Social Media Director
Muhammad
Ali.
Crafting brand narratives and visual strategies for companies that refuse to be ordinary. Based in Berlin.
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MA
Based in Berlin, I work at the intersection of brand strategy and visual communication — building identities, communities, and campaigns that feel alive. From prosthetics startups to specialty fashion to food, I bring the same obsessive attention to how a brand speaks, looks, and moves.
My work spans social media strategy, content creation, brand identity, and production ownership — always with an eye on what's authentic versus what's just noise.
Wine & Coffee House is an independent café and wine bar in Berlin with roots going back to 1953. Despite serving a loyal local crowd and offering a genuinely distinctive atmosphere, the brand had almost no active digital presence — and no strategy connecting its visual identity to audience growth.
The Instagram page existed. The quality of the offer was real. But nothing was translating into reach, discovery, or new customers.
When I came on board, the brand had several compounding problems that needed to be solved simultaneously — not sequentially.
Developed a coherent visual language — colour palette, typography, photography style, and graphic templates — so every piece of content felt like it belonged to the same world.
Rebuilt the content strategy around Instagram's Explore algorithm. Every post was crafted to trigger non-follower discovery through strong visual hooks, intentional captions, and strategic hashtag architecture.
Shot all photography and video on location. Designed all branded templates in Adobe Creative Suite. Managed the full content calendar — planning, scheduling, publishing, and monthly analytics.
Photography, branded design, social content, print materials — produced as a complete creative system.
Bar craft — signature cocktail
Atmosphere & interior photography
Signature drink on marble table
Branded design system
Event & product photography
All metrics measured across the first 90 days of the new strategy.
Beyond day-to-day content, I developed a complete brand system the client now owns — templates, guidelines, and a visual language any future team member or collaborator can pick up and use consistently.
Great hospitality brands don't just serve drinks — they create a feeling. My job was to make sure that feeling translated into every pixel.
Horus Prosthetics builds precision lower-limb devices that restore independence and mobility to amputees in Berlin. The products are exceptional — each device is engineered with remarkable care. The communication had not caught up.
The brand needed a voice and visual strategy that honoured both the technical rigour of the work and the deeply human stories it enables — without leaning into inspiration clichés.
Medical technology brands face a specific communication trap: over-explain the science and lose the human element, or sentimentalise and lose engineering credibility. Horus had fallen into neither trap — they simply hadn't communicated at all.
The making — components, assembly, materials. The workshop as a place of serious, careful precision. No sentimentality, just craft.
The using — people in the world with Horus devices. Cycling, walking, running. Life without limitation.
The ecosystem — team, partners, patients as advocates. Building a brand that real people want to be part of.
Photography and content strategy — showing the craft, the people, and the precision behind every device.
Motion — cycling in Berlin
Craft — assembly in workshop
Detail — component close-up
Tools and materials
Device precision — assembled
Metrics measured across the first three months of the new strategy.
A complete strategy document and content system the team can operate independently — including visual guidelines, a photography brief, content calendar framework, and a 12-week execution plan.
Show the work. The precision, the craft, the weight of every component. The humanity follows naturally — you don't need to manufacture it.
Gota Kinari is a South Asian fashion label by designer Fizz Ahmed. Gota is the intricate gold trim craft native to the subcontinent — kinari means edge or border. The challenge was to build a brand identity that honoured that cultural specificity while feeling completely contemporary.
The brand needed to speak to a diaspora audience — people who carry deep cultural pride but exist in a modern, global visual landscape. It couldn't feel nostalgic. It needed to feel bold, confident, and owned.
Fashion brand identities for diaspora audiences walk a narrow line: too literal and the brand feels like a costume; too abstracted and the cultural reference disappears entirely.
A bold pixel grid pattern — a nod to the geometric weave of traditional gota trim, translated into maximalist, almost Op-Art language. What was once woven by hand becomes data. Modern material, ancient logic.
A refined serif for the full wordmark 'Gota Kinari', paired with a heavyweight grotesque for the companion name. The GK monogram oversized and cropped — confident enough to feel like a fashion house from day one.
Sticker rolls in hot pink and saffron yellow featuring henna hands and Urdu phrases — 'Qabool Hai' and wedding-celebration references. Every unboxing becomes a moment of cultural recognition.
Shopping bags, boxes, hang tags, business cards, stickers, tissue wrap — a complete packaging system.
Floating shopping bags — hero packaging
Kraft shipping box with pixel band
Business cards — scattered
Hang tags — textured grey with gold
Sticker roll — pink and saffron
Every touchpoint extended the identity with cultural intention — nothing arbitrary.
A complete brand system the designer owns outright — every template, every guideline, every physical format. Gota Kinari launched with a visual identity strong enough to scale.
A brand that wears its culture loudly — not as costume, but as identity. The pixel grid is the gota trim: modern material, ancient logic.
Doughnut Time is Berlin's most unapologetically colourful food brand. Australian energy, maximum colour, baked fresh daily. They needed photography that could simultaneously serve three channels without losing impact on any of them.
A Shopify e-commerce store, an active Instagram presence, and out-of-home campaign materials across the city — each with entirely different requirements. The work covered two distinct shoots: the year-round core collection and a dedicated Valentine's Day campaign.
Food photography that performs across e-commerce, social, and OOH simultaneously is not the same discipline. Each channel has fundamentally different requirements — and most photography only serves one.
Every product shot for doughnuttime.de: warm backgrounds pulled from each product's own palette. Burnt orange for Lotus Biscoff, deep red for Valentine's, cream for the classics. Clean enough to work in a Shopify grid. Charged enough to make you click.
Heart-shaped doughnuts stacked on deep red with scattered rose petals. The interior revealed in cross-section. The brief: romance as excess, shot with precision. One session covering product pages, feed posts, and story formats simultaneously.
Photography extended beyond digital. The branded takeaway bag became its own piece of street communication. OOH placements on Berlin street pillars brought the product into the city's visual landscape.
Product shots, campaign photography, lifestyle, and OOH — a complete visual library for three channels.
Lotus Biscoff — e-commerce hero
Valentine's collection — full flatlay
Six hearts arranged — Valentine's campaign
E-commerce on doughnuttime.de
Branded bag — street lifestyle
Every image performing across all three channels.
A photography library covering every product in the range, a full Valentine's campaign, branded lifestyle shots, and OOH-ready imagery — all in two shoot days.
Food photography that sells has to make you hungry before it makes you click. One subject. One background. The product earns the frame.
AZAFRN is a Mexican restaurant in Berlin's Lichtenberg neighbourhood — bold food, warm interiors, and a distinct personality built into every corner of the space. The sombrero on the green wall. The hot sauce bottles. The handmade tortillas. None of it was translating into digital presence.
The brief covered both photography and ongoing social media management: build a visual language for the brand, grow a community around it, and make the food look as good as it tastes.
Mexican food in Berlin has a discovery problem — the city has no shortage of options, and most are visually indistinguishable on a feed. AZAFRN's food was genuinely better than the competition. Their social presence made them invisible.
Studio-clean product stills for delivery platforms and menus — warm sand backgrounds, precise lighting, each item isolated. Kitchen-alive action shots for social — the cheese pour mid-drip, the quesadilla cut to reveal layers.
Every post optimised for Explore discovery — strong visual hooks, captions in German and English, hashtag architecture targeting Berlin's food community. The grid designed to feel curated but warm.
300 posts planned, shot, and published. The account grew to 11.4K followers with engagement that reflects an audience that genuinely wants to visit — not one that just happened to follow.
Food photography in two modes — studio precision and kitchen action.
Sombrero — atmosphere and personality
Cheese pour — kitchen action
Quesadilla — studio product shot
Ingredients — flatlay
Hot sauce bottles — lifestyle
Metrics across the full engagement period.
A photography archive covering every menu item, every seasonal special, and every social format. AZAFRN's Instagram is now one of the more followed independent Mexican restaurant pages in Berlin.
Make the food the hero — but let the atmosphere in through the edges. The sombrero, the hot sauce, the gloved hand: the details that say this place has a soul.