New portfolio website
Friday, May 13, 2016


My professional portfolio has been available at this address for more than 10 years. It has seen many and various iterations as my body of work has grown, career developed and web design skills improved

I established this website in its current form in 2010 and it has served me well, until recently. Surprisingly, it receives hundreds of hits per month but it's clearly outdated and Google isn't as generous with its rankings as it once was

I'm not a web designer or developer and I didn't ever tackle fully controlled CSS layouts, which became the norm in the late noughties. CSS controlled layouts are already well beyond my website design ambitions so it's highly unlikely that I'll attempt CSS controlled layouts for a responsive website. Fortunately, there are now many platforms that provide tools to set up responsive websites without the need for coding skills. I've become quite well-versed in Webflow, which is exceedingly good

As I hope you'll gather, my new website isn't simply to showcase work and demonstrate my positioning, it's also a platform to champion ideas that underpin my work. Among these ideas, pride of place is given to 'brand as operating system'. 'Brand as operating system' is a logical conclusion to 'brand as organising principle', which was championed by the likes of Wolff Olins in the early noughties as the basis of brand thinking for business in a digital age

I'll expound on 'brand as operating system' as I go about my business – in person and via my new website, which is now available at business-os.com

[Update: For the sake of simplicity, I've since reverted to using andrewsabatier.com as my primary website and using business-os.com to host this website for legacy purposes]







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New positioning and portfolio coming soon
Monday, April 25, 2016


It's been three years since I last updated my website and PDF portfolio. It's been a fruitful three years and in this time I've also thought long and hard about how best to position myself with agencies, recruiters and direct clients

It's become abundantly clear to me that, in the world of branding, design alone isn't worth much. Designers are a dime a dozen and many claim to do branding. Design in branding often doesn't extend beyond logos and 'look and feel' exercises under direction from senior people with business and brand strategy experience

With this in mind I've decided to overstep the role description 'Brand Identity Designer', despite a defendable claim to having invented it (circa 2000). I've witnessed the uptake of this description within the broader branding community but this has been mostly by less experienced designers working outside of the larger London-based brand agencies. Disappointingly, designers with an equivalent skill-set don't appear to see the merit of replacing less accurate (and problematic) role descriptions such as 'Brand Designer' and 'Branding Designer' with 'Brand Identity Designer', and neither do many senior branding people in related roles appear to recognise its proper value

As it's become well-known to people with whom I've worked, I generate a lot of brand identity content that supports wholly considered and fully designed brand identities. This often means many creative brand strategy boxes also get ticked. This includes but is not limited to naming, brand essence, pre-branding presentations, brand narratives, positioning lines, brandlines and, most importantly, organising principles that work to articulate, extend and elevate business strategy

Over the coming weeks I expect to make available a new PDF portfolio that's been tailored to various audiences. My current website has served me well but it no longer cuts the mustard. It will remain online for legacy purposes and will be superceded by a new fully responsive website at an address that reflects my new positioning

In the meantime, if you've not yet seen my early 2013 portfolio, please click on the image above to download it as a high resolution PDF






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