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 It will remain online for legacy purposes and will be superceded by a new fully responsive website at an address that reflects my new positioning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