Kittelfdora KidsMy Little Home
Menu

For parents and teachers

Who Is Behind Kittelfdora Kids

This site asks for twenty minutes of your child's attention, so it's fair to ask who's asking. The answer is one person, and this page is for the parents and teachers who want more than a name. My name is Deniz Arsan. I was born in Ankara in 1972, I live in a village near Urla with a rescue dog and about twenty cats, and I've spent most of my working life making things for children. Here's the whole story.

Deniz Arsan at his desk with his tabby cat, while Miri and Ori, the illustrated Kittelfdora characters, appear on the desk beside him as if they've joined the workday.
My actual desk and my actual cat. Miri and Ori invited themselves in.

The road to Kağıt vs.

I finished İzmir Özel Türk Koleji in 1989 and studied English language teaching at METU in Ankara. Then came three years in England, where I did a master's in hospitality management at Sheffield Hallam University. Back in Turkey I settled in Istanbul: first hotel work at the Crowne Plaza Istanbul, then a public relations agency, until 2004.

That year I came home to İzmir and joined our family company, Punto Yayıncılık, working alongside my mother, Leyla Arsan, and my sister, İdil Arsan. In 2005 the three of us started something called Kağıt vs., which means "Paper etc."

We began by importing arts and crafts materials for young children: shaped punches, unusual papers, felts, scissors that cut in patterns. Abroad, the children's craft world was rich and full. In Turkey at the time, it was colored cardboard. We saw the gap and went for it.

Then something funny happened. People picked the products up, loved them, and put them back down, because nobody knew what to make with them. So we started sending out an email bulletin full of project ideas. Before long, the bulletin and the projects mattered more to people than the products did. Everyone was waiting for the next one. So we turned it into a magazine.

The magazine years

Kağıt vs. the magazine first came out in 2006: an arts and crafts magazine for children and preschool teachers, six issues a year, distributed across all of Turkey. It ran for ten years, 55 issues in total, and we made every part of it in-house.

The magazine grew arms and legs. In 2008 we opened a summer children's workshop in Alaçatı, and in 2010 a workshop and craft shop in Istanbul.

It also brought the brands to our door. We spent years in consultancy and collaboration with Umur Kırtasiye, the Turkish distributor of UHU, Stabilo, and Canson and maker of its own Crafts & Arts line. Together we ran the "Özgür Eller" project, traveling all over Turkey to meet preschool teachers and train them in person. We worked with Art Boya, the company that brought Sculpey, Goodwin, Folia, and many other brands to Turkey, on more programs for preschool teachers. We produced content for Bic Türkiye for years, including teacher training and their social media. For Canson in France, we wrote close to a hundred pieces of content for their websites. And for Faber-Castell Türkiye we built the "İz Bırakan Öğretmenler" website, "Teachers Who Leave a Mark," and wrote everything on it, a project that ran a very long time, alongside years of content work with Faber-Castell and Adel Kalemcilik.

If you were a preschool teacher in Turkey in those years, there's a decent chance something I helped make passed through your hands.

Cover of Kağıt vs. issue 5, May 2007, a Turkish children's craft magazine full of colorful paper projects.Cover of Kağıt vs. issue 21, January 2010, a winter issue showing little dolls made of pinecones.Cover of Kağıt vs. issue 55, September 2015, the final issue of the magazine.
Three covers straight from my own archive: issue 5, issue 21, and issue 55, the very last one. Between the first of these and the last sit almost ten years of our lives, in paper, felt, and glue.

The television years

While the magazine was running, TRT's İzmir studio came calling. We made the crafts segment of "Hayal Fabrikası," a children's program; my sister İdil presented it, and it aired on TRT back when TRT Çocuk, the national children's channel, didn't exist yet.

When it did exist, we went with it. On TRT Çocuk we were the project consultants for "Sürpriz Kutusu": every project and every piece of content that appeared on the show came from us, and we wrote the scripts. The theatre actor Lemi Filozof presented it. Two hundred episodes were filmed and aired. The YouTube views passed the millions, and the reruns are still on today.

After "Sürpriz Kutusu," Lemi and I kept going. On the YouTube channel "Lemi Abi ve Zuzi" we prepared all the arts and crafts content, and Lemi made it on camera. The channel is still up.

Then Urla, and Kittelfdora Kids

Deniz Arsan at a wooden table at home, smiling down at small figures of Miri and Ori; Ori balances on a stack of books with his arms spread wide, while a real tabby cat sleeps on the couch behind them, in a warm living room lined with bookshelves.
An ordinary afternoon in Bademler. The cat sleeps through everything. Miri and Ori never do.

At 49, with 50 coming into view, I wanted a calmer, quieter life. So I moved to Urla, near İzmir, and started the project that's entirely my own: Kittelfdora Kids. It's not my only desk, either: since 2020 I've been a consultant at Restar Otomotiv (Hotomobil), on corporate communications and on AI projects.

What I want to build here comes straight from something that's been in me all along: a love of animals and nature. I want children to meet that love early. I want them to grow up unafraid of animals, learning life side by side with them. And I want to support them in growing into people with empathy and a conscience, people who are friends to animals. That's the aim. Everything on this site is built toward it.

The animals behind all of this

I should tell you the other half of why Kittelfdora Kids went from a hobby to my whole working day.

I've always been the sort of person who loves every kind of animal: cats, dogs, crows, all of them. And helping street animals however I can isn't a project of mine, it's just how my family is. My mother, my father, my sister İdil, all of us. Over time, the cost of that care started to strain us. So I made a decision: take Kittelfdora Kids global, and build it into something that might one day help support these animals too.

Here's what that looks like in practice. I live in Bademler, a village in Urla, with one rescue dog and around twenty cats, and between us, my family cares for many more rescued dogs and cats besides.

I'm not telling you this to tug at your heart. I'm telling you because it's the truth of why this site exists, and if you're going to trust me with your child's attention, you should know what I'm working for.

How I work with AI, honestly

A composite image that joins a real photo and an illustration in one frame: Deniz Arsan photographed on one side, and the Pixar-style rendered Kittelfdora characters Miri and Ori on the other.
Real and imagined, side by side. That's the whole working method in one picture.

You may feel wary of content made with AI. Plenty of people do, often for good reasons, so let me tell you plainly how it works here.

I've always loved technology, and I work with AI every day, here and in my consulting work. Not as a machine that makes things for me, but as a work partner. A colleague. It's become my extra pair of hands, my assistant, the co-worker who can do the things one person simply can't do alone.

But here's the part that matters: AI doesn't think for me. We think together.

Every idea on this site starts with me. The characters, the stories, the way a game should feel, what a four-year-old should and shouldn't meet on a screen: those come from my own imagination and from decades of making things for children. What AI gives me is reach. It lets one person in a village near Urla turn all of that experience into songs, stories, and games, and carry them to children around the world. Alone, I couldn't. Together, we can.

So yes, AI helped make what you see here. And a person you now know by name imagined it, shaped it, and stands behind every piece of it.

Portrait of Deniz Arsan, the founder of Kittelfdora Kids.
Deniz Arsan, at home in Urla.

Come say hello

Real name, real village, real phone. This corner is for grown-ups: if you have a question, a concern, or an idea for working together, I'd love to hear from you.