Biography - Andrey Babich

Hello!
I am Andrey Babich.

An international, multidisciplinary designer from Baku, Azerbaijan. I have 20+ years of experience in various design-related entities, fields, including design studios, startups, creative agencies, and even my own small studio. Despite my current focus on UX/UI Design, my skill set includes Creative Design, Motion Design, Front-End (WP, Elementor, HTML, CSS), Game development (Flash/Animate), 3D (Blender, Unity3D).

Woodworks

In addition, I love working with natural materials such as stone and wood. It's well-known that switching between different activities stimulates the brain and helps improve results. Working with organic forms also gives the brain a break from standard interfaces and inspires new ideas. I have created around four board games, conceptualized and crafted from wood, and approximately five interior items for my family and cats. My motto is Wood.Boardgames.Cats - Wooden Board Games for Cats. One day, I plan to create a board game to play with my cat.

Dentistry

Uniquely, my story as a multidisciplinary, product designer started in dentistry... Indeed, I am a certified orthopaedic dentist, and this period of study, no doubt, had a significant influence on evolving my perceptions of the aesthetic world. Just like crafting artificial teeth requires mastering various, seemingly unrelated, scientific fields, multidimensional design, is a blend of diverse methods and techniques from different technological and artistic spheres that come together in a cohesive creative process to achieve a desired result.

Family

I also have a teenage daughter named Lisa, an incredibly creative and artistic child. Interacting with her helps me understand modern children and bridge the generation gap that is rapidly growing. Sometimes, we record small "professional" vlogs on YouTube. In some of them , we experiment with stop-motion and clay and in others, she explores the 8-bit computer of my childhood.

WORK EXPERIENCE

SAFFRON Group

Baku, Azerbaijan

03/2023 – 06/2024

Visual Designer / Brand Manager

As the brand manager of Saffron Group, my scope of work includes both managing and designing roles. While the first one requires a quality control of all the materials produced by the company’s subcontractors (agencies and printhouses), the second role involves my design and animation skills in current projects, such as Website development, creating visual identity for new restaurants and other entities, maintaining the archives in order and participating in photo and video shootings. Expanded responsibilities include negotiations with our potential global partners (Loyalty app development) and providing training for new members of staff.

BakuPay

Baku, Azerbaijan

10/2020 – 06/2022

Head of Design

As the head of design at this startup, my primary responsibility is to help the company refine, maintain, and expand its brand guide while ensuring that the mobile app interface is designed in line with brand needs and user feedback, so as to continually improve user experience and customer satisfaction. My secondary roles cover a wide variety of tasks from art direction of the in-house photographer (partners’ campaigns) to generating ideas for creative media (utilising more progressive channels, such as the innovative use of the urban environment via malls, streets, buildings, parks, etc)

Moonmilk

by McCann Riga

Baku, Azerbaijan

03/2023 – 06/2024

Senior Art Director

Acting as the Senior Graphic Designer, I helped my Latvian colleagues adapt their creative products and ideas for the Azerbaijani market. I further provided new creative solutions and ideas for our corporate clients and partners, created an interface for the corporate website and social media promotion, and trained junior designers and interns working on our team.

Novelwall

London, UK

02/2018 – 10/2019

Graphic Designer / UI / UX Designer

I started my work for this company with a complete rebranding; I created the new logotype and corporate identity and refreshed/relaunched the website. I further negotiated technical details and web-engine development with outsourced partners and supervised them during this year long process. Later, I independently set up and launched 5 successful mini websites for our partners using the WordPress engine. My key marketing achievement was in the creation of innovative, modular stands for exhibitions and sales points. By reducing storage space, delivery, printing and other expenses, these flexible stands helped the company save in their marketing budget up to 40%.

DDB

Baku, Azerbaijan

09/2014 – 11/2017

Senior Art Director

During nearly 4 years with DDB, I successfully built one of the strongest and most solid design teams in Azerbaijan. Our team created and implemented pre-opening and opening campaigns for the biggest hypermarket in Azerbaijan (BRAVO), a series of successful campaigns for the biggest telecom provider in Azerbaijan (Azercell), McDonald’s, and Re-branding for Azerbaijan Airlines etc. Besides generating ideas and leading brainstorming sessions, I also trained juniors and interns for different creative activities and continually motivated them during the workflow process.

Khatt

Baku, Azerbaijan

08/2006 – 10/2010

Multimedia Developer / Art Director

With this company, I began as the Multimedia Developer and Art Director and built a small but productive creative department. We developed interactive projects, such as maps and 3D-tours. This innovative department increased the price of our printing production (science and historic books) by 20-30%, adding interesting and unique features such as multimedia CDs with virtual tours. One of the most exciting and unusual projects was the 3D tour based on the ruined, ancient catacombs near Sheki, Azerbaijan. This was challenging not only for me as a developer but also for the marketing team because we brought our production to a brand-new level. My other key achievement was the Interactive Game e-Xalcha (Interactive Carpet Constructor) that was chosen to represent Azerbaijan at the 2009 Venetian Biennale. In total, during my work for the Khatt agency, our team produced more that 10 multimedia projects, maps and 3D-tours.

SCISSORS

Baku, Azerbaijan

07/2005 – 06/2006

Co-Founder / Art Director

Art Studio SCISSORS was not only a web studio but also my first attempt to run a whole creative department by myself as an Art Director. As the result, my main achievement was creating a strong design team and influencing several successful designers.

ADaNet

Baku, Azerbaijan

10/2001 – 06/2005

Graphic Designer / Web Designer

Initially with this company, I started as a team Graphic Designer, but in 2 years time, I was promoted to the Lead Designer and Flash Professional, training juniors and interns according to the company’s workflow. One of my achievements during this period was presenting a new banner rotation system, which provided our team with access and control over the corporate banners, reducing time wasted by buying additional placements and negotiating the ratio with providers. This system helped to reduce expenses of the marketing budget and save critical time for our design team.

Digital Age

Baku, Azerbaijan

01/2001 – 08/2001

Web Designer / HTML Coder

During this first employment opportunity, I began as a Junior HTML coder but soon grew into the Graphic Designer and Flash Animator position. I self-studied JavaScript and ActionScript 1 basics, as well as experimented with animation and programming