The Brand Surgery - Branding, Graphic Design and Web Design in Worthing, West Sussex

Richy Moss graduating at Sussex University

Meet Richy. Our clever, but non-geeky web developer. Richy joined our branding agency a few weeks ago. As you can see he recently graduated and is sporting a Computer Science BSc certificate in the photo above. Richy lives in Worthing, and when he is not working, he loves playing football at County level for Worthing United.

Naturally, we grilled Richy to find out his loves and hates, and here are his replies:

VV: So Richy, when you’re not working on websites or playing football, what do you like to do?
RM: Going to gigs – The last one we went to was Greendays.

VV: What kind of music do you like?
RM: I love anything really. Rock. Anything. Eclectic I suppose.

VV: So what is your food?
RM: Roast Lamb and mint sauce. Yummmmmmmm.

VV: So what is this Computer Science degree all about?
RM: I was on a cutting-edge course at the University of Sussex which was rated in the top 15 of UK universities for the quality and volume of our research in the 2008 Research Assessment Exercise (RAE). UoS taught us core skills such as Java programming and teamwork, SQL and relational database management, as well as professional issues and career development, with a focus on employability.

VV: So what will you bring to our customers?
RM: Fresh ideas, innovative approach – although I know you have oodles of that already. My work will compliment your award-winning branding agency.
VV: Oooh. Richy. Keep it coming!!

VV: Do you have any bug bears?
RM: Yes, bad functionality makes my blood boil. I hate it when things don’t make sense – like when you click somewhere on a website and what you expect to happen just doesn’t happen! Usability is key to website success. I am not a lover of flash websites and I detest seeing frames.

VV: What is your favourite website?
RM: The BBC site is excellent. I love the polished design and good functionality. It is very easy to use.

VV: While researching for this blog, Richie, look at these awful websites we spotted! They need help!
• http://havenworks.com/people/a-z/b/biden-joseph-robinette-jr/
• http://yvettesbridalformal.com
RM: Yuk. They are vile! They should come with a health warning – could seriously damage your eyesight. Are these for real?

VV: So what about website design then? Funky backgrounds seem to be fashionable right now. Do you think it will last?
RM: Yes probably because screens are getting larger all the time, so now there is more room for visual impact.

VV: Any last words?
RM: All the website development projects I work on are naturally W3C standard compliant, paying special attention to semantic mark-up to ensure our customers websites make more sales.

VV: Welcome to our team Richy!

Remember, you only get one chance to make a first impression. The Brand Surgery’s speciality is branding websites combined with good functionality. So if your website is letting you down, don’t fear. Call us on 01903 824229 to have a no-obligation chat about your website. The Brand Surgery, branding agency in West Sussex serves Brighton, Portslade, Shoreham, Worthing, Littlehampton, Arundel, Chichester, Portsmouth, Horsham, Crawley and the Gatwick Diamond area.

Lisa Cooper, our work experience extravaganza, showing off her research for her pop-up book, Indiana Penguin!

This week, we pass the hot spot over to Lisa Cooper, our work experience pop-up book legend!

Hello …

My name is Lisa Cooper, I am 15 years old and I go to Davison CE High School for girls, in Worthing. Every year, amongst other schools, Davison give the opportunity for every girl in year 10 to have a go at work experience so like most others, I used this opportunity to do exactly that. I got myself a placement at The Brand Surgery – a graphic design based company. Impressed by my graphics portfolio, The Brand Surgery have asked me to write a blog about the graphics course at Davison, so here goes nothing!

At Davison, I take graphics as an option and what a brilliant option it is. Most people think that when it comes to graphics it’s all design work, but I assure you it’s far more involved than that! When I first began the course my teacher got us to practice designing, researching and manufacturing. Now, usually I would enjoy doing design work but it is slightly less enjoyable when your teacher is timing you, and every once in a while going ‘Tick … Tock’. However, what I did learn from him doing that is the time constraints sometimes issued on you when you have work to complete. This was a good method to use to prepare us for what was coming up!

The project began …

When I began the actual project, my teacher briefed us on what we needed to do and what the structure of the lessons was going to be like. He explained that we would need to do a lot of research before starting the design work. Doing this helped me gain an understanding of the requirements of the target audience I would need to aim my product at and what sort of things would appeal to them. We had a choice of either designing and creating a perfume box or a pop-up book. Now, I don’t know about you, but when given the choice between a perfume box or a pop-up book, one kinda stands out more than the other? So I chose the pop-up book. From this I started the research.

To meet the criteria of the brief the exam board gave to my teacher, I would need to do a lot of research, in a lot of detail. The three main pieces of research we had to complete were: product comparison, product disassembly and a survey. The product comparison helped me see what competition there was on the market and where gaps were – Gaps for me to fill with my product. Now, what is an interesting, unique, original and child friendly theme for a pop-up book? Indiana penguin of course! This idea ensured that it would be suitable for both males and females as it is adventurous and also. Who doesn’t love penguins?

The survey

However, a lot more research and development was needed for this idea to work. This is where the survey came in. For my survey I came up with several questions, all relevant to my theme, to be asked to three different age groups, for a range of feedback on what I could do to improve and develop my idea. From the data I received back I then converted it into pie charts and analysed it. I then wrote a detailed description of what the data suggested to me and how I was going to use it in my later designs. Seems like a lot of work for just one popup book right? Wrong! This helped me develop my work a lot as I got user group feedback and my idea was becoming more developed and evermore like a realistic goal to achieve!

After doing all the research I started on initial designs, where again I got user group feedback on all designs by doing a review, and I also reviewed my work myself to see if my designs met specification points I had written which stated what requirements my designs had to meet. From this I labeled my designs: Red, Amber and Green – A common way of self reviewing your work at Davison. Red, meaning that the design needs a lot of work, amber, meaning the design would need some work done on it, and green, meaning it meets all specification points and would need very little work done on it. After taking into account of the feedback I had got, I developed all designs that were red and amber and started to work out how my designs would work when put into a popup book, so I designed some nets and made a prototype!

Once I had made my prototype I got feedback for each product and developed them, if indeed they needed development. This helped me produce my final design accompanied by a series of nets all drawn to scale. By completing this, I had completed two ‘bits’ to the project – the research and the designing. In year 11 I will start the manufacturing part of my pop-up book and that is when I will see if all that research and development has paid off!

So to sum up… Davison offers a brilliant graphics course that will inform you and help you gain experience in, not only the basics of graphic design, but also the stages needed to accomplish researching, designing and manufacturing a product. Not bad eh?

Thank you Davisons!

Thank you to Davisons for sending us Sarah! We are well impressed with your graphic design course, and think that some university students could learn a thing or two here!

Call The Brand Surgery on 01903 824229 if you would like to find out more about our graphic design and branding services.

Indiana Penguin by Lisa Cooper

ILM NVQ Level 3 for The Brand Surgery

The Brand Surgery, branding agency in West Sussex, have been swotting up on a Train to Gain course, supplied by Northbrook College, to bring our customers an even smoother and seamless service. Brand promise and customer care are our priority, and in future, our improved back-end office system for producing logo design, web design and development, brochure design, exhibition design and so on, will be even slicker, as we have put improved systems in place as part of our training. At The Brand Surgery, we invest in our staff, so that they are continually learning, which is stimulating them, and maintaining interest. Everyone is happy!

What courses are we on?

The boss, Vicky Vaughan, is working towards The Institute of Leadership and Management (ILM), NVQ level 3  Management qualification which is broadly equivalent to a GCE A Level. This will be her second NVQ Level 3 course, after she passed the Business Setup course in 2005 with a distinction.

The NVQ in Management (NQF Level 3) has been specially designed for first line managers with responsibility for: managing budgets, allocating work to team members/colleagues/contractors, achieving specific results and for some decision making. The qualification aims to give participants an opportunity to develop their management performance, become more effective and to progress their career. Vicky is taking four mandatory units (which look at managing resources, heath and safety, leadership, and allocating/monitoring work) plus three optional units.

Jody, our creative goddess, is on the OCR Business Administration course, level 2. This qualification provides evidence of competence of being in a supporting role in an office environment. Optional units provide opportunity to show understanding and skills in a variety of areas, including basic finance, IT and contributing to events.

We would like to thank Northbrook College for working with us, in between us rebranding businesses to make them beautiful and increase their sales!

Call us on 01903 824229 if you think we can help your business grow.

The Brand Surgery training with OCR

The magicman rebrand included new logo, brochure, website and livery.

We are very proud of our latest achievement – the magicman® rebrand!

Way back last year we created a stunning new look for magicman®. Our brief was that they wanted to move the company onto the bigger things, and hence they required a new corporate look. The brief including a new logo, brochure, website and livery, plus signage for their new executive offices.

We created the magicman® logo in a variety of formats, all which can be used in various mediums eg. for press advertising (black and white version of logo), white logo for placing on dark backgrounds, blue logo for placing on white backgrounds. The accent colours are a warm lime green and stone colour. This client didn’t require a branding toolbox, however branding toolboxes are part of our platinum brand consultation service and are excellent to send out if you are having adverts designed, or to promotional product companies.

You will see we kept the dark blue for the rebrand, plus we kept the ’star’ as the ‘dot’ on the ‘i’ of magicman® – just a tadge more tasteful.

The new magicman® logo, just like The Brand Surgery logo, is a registered trademark and we recommend that if you want your company to ‘go large’ you should also do the same.

We are now well on the way with the website, and hope that before long we will be blogging about another magic success.

Branding tips

We always recommend that a business rebrands every four to five years as fashions change and old logos look stale. It needn’t be a total evolution. Perhaps just a simple font or shape modification will do in many cases. In my new book, DO A MADONNA!™, I show you some of the larger companies that have successfully rebranded – and in some cases the change is minimal. It is important that when you rebrand, you are still attractive and recognisable to your target audience. CONFUSION = MISTRUST. If you want customers to invest in your services, you must gain their trust and loyalty.

In case you are new to our blogs, you may not know that that we do have a new online brochure service if you are worried about the cost of print – a rebrand need not cost the earth.

Call Vicky at The Brand Surgery, branding agency serving Brighton, Arundel, Chichester, Crawley Horsham, Littlehampton, Worthing, and the rest of West Sussex on 01903 824229.

Happy branding!

Magicman rebrand included logo, brochure, website, livery, signage, uniforms

Worthing Idol 2010Worthing Idol 2010 - Only 36 places available.

A brand new talent show in the style of Britain’s Got Talent is coming to Worthing soon! Talent Within You are launching Worthing Idol 2010 which takes place on August Bank Holiday, 30th August 2010 in South Street, Worthing (just down the steps from the Guildbourne Centre).

Talent Within You helps children and young adults to develop their talent and to take it to the next level by raising funds from local businesses. You may remember Jack Ford, Olympic hopeful who with the help of Talent Within You, danced with Todd Carty on Worthing’s annual ice rink in January. Worthing Town Centre Initiative have kindly funded Worthing Idol 2010 which takes place from 12pm to 3pm, with prize-giving from 3.30pm.

This talent competition is open to anybody up to the age of 18. Talents can range from singing, dancing, magic, comedy. Anything that will entertain the audience! All contestants will receive a Worthing Idol 2010 medal, and the main winner will receive £250 towards taking their talent to the next level. Terms and conditions do apply to the prize money.

HURRY UP AND ENTER! THE POSTERS HAVE ONLY BEEN UP FOR FIVE DAYS AND WE HAVE HAD LOTS OF ENTRIES.

The judges are three well-known local Wor-lebrities: No Simon Cowell to be seen anywhere!

• Tim Loughton MP, Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for Children and Families
• Amelia Regnante, Regnante School of Performing Arts
• Andy Sparsis, Proto Restaurant Group

Contestants need to book soon as there are on 36 places available. The stage is covered in case of bad weather, and will be 12’ x 16’, so small groups are allowed.

Download an application form from the website: www.talentwithinyou.org.uk.

Talent Within You is the idea of Vicky Vaughan who wanted to reduce street crime and violence by giving kids a purpose in life. The Brand Surgery has designed the logo, the website and all the promotional material for Talent Within You. We have also worked on all the PR. We are working hard to make Talent Within You a registered charity and we need £5000 in total to do this. Once we are a charity, we can apply for grants and help more children develop their talent. Please help us by fundraising, so we can help more children and make the streets of Britain a safer place to live, work and play.

DO A MADONNA

The day has finally come. DO A MADONNA!™ has been printed! Hoorah!

The book should be available on Amazon.co.uk within the next two weeks. However, you can pre-order the book on the website by clicking here.

Writing a book has been a steep learning curve. The writing was the easy part! The proofing, liaising with the print company and pre-press was the main challenge – and we deal with pre-press departments every day! I can’t imagine what it would be like dealing with these book printing companies if you had no experience whatsoever.

With the above said, we are looking forward to marketing DO A MADONNA and I am looking for speaking opportunities to launch it. So if you know of a venue or organisation who would like to book an interesting talk, this is the one for them. Guaranteed to stimulate people, even during the graveyard shift!

A little bit about DO A MADONNA …

Keeping your brand alive takes much more than plonking a new logo on a new brochure or website. You are your business and this ten-step book will help you on your way to business success. DO A MADONNA!™ is a handy-sized book which will help you discover the ten secrets of successful branding and it also contains tips on colour psychology, plus much more!

You will learn that even well known companies make branding blunders. DO A MADONNA!™ will teach you how to learn from their mistakes

It’s time to get your business into the groove. It’s time to Express Yourself! Soon your business will be good enough to grace the cover of Vogue!

Priced at only £10. Let Your journey to WORLD DOMINATION begin.

5% of all book profits go towards Madonna’s charity: http://www.raisingmalawi.org

Click to launch the full edition in a new window.

We've been shortlisted for The Southern Business Awards

It’s award time again! We’ve been shortlisted for the Southern Business Awards in the Small Business category which takes place at The Grand Hotel in Brighton on 3rd September 2010. We have some stiff competition as we are up against Denton Motors in Worthing, Newhaven Enterprise Centre, Shopper Anonymous, St Leonards-on-Sea and Cake Box in Hastings.

We are proud to of been shortlisted, and wish the best of British to all the companies that have also been shortlisted, particularly our client Proto Restaurant Group who are shortlisted for Employer of the Year.

You may remember that last year we were awarded the Business Marketing and Promotion Award 2010 in the Worthing Business Awards. We are very proud of our achievement and put it down to our ethos in business which is:

The Brand Surgery believes in the principle of ‘givers gain’. We give branding advice and give help to businesses by offering high-end branding services at realistic prices. Our tried and tested formula to marketing is ‘HONESTY’ and ‘HELPING OTHERS’. We help businesses and we put ourselves in their shoes. We believe that using honesty when helping our clients with their marketing and promotions is the way forward.

Clients we have helped are so pleased with our expertise that they have passed our name to other businesses that also want to grow. We have advised all of our clients that good branding, marketing and promotions are the key to standing out, especially when the economy is tough. Customers are going to buy from businesses that look professional and established. The customers that have taken our branding advice have thrived throughout the recession.

Everything we advise our clients to do we test on our business first – from website design, to logo design, to customer care to the envelopes we post our marketing packs in. ‘Give’ as you would like to ‘receive’ is our motto for helping businesses to grow.

If you like our business philosophy, then we would love to work with you.

Visit our website www.thebrandsurgery.co.uk or call 01903 824229.

We are celebrating here as our blog portfolio is forever expanding. We’ve been blogging for a number of clients for over a couple of years now, and the main healthy slice of feedback is … that our blogs have PERSONALITY. They have even been described as LEGEND! We all know that it is essential that your brand has personality, and blogging is an ideal medium to channel that personality. And what’s more important, is that your blog does its job well. Our blogging works as our customers have seen increase in their sales due to their website being ranked higher in Google.

Question: What have garden decking and Eddie Izzard got in common?

Answer: Decking is tough and durable, just like Eddie Izzard it seems. If you didn’t know this, Eddie Izzard celebrated completing 43 marathons in 52 days! Wow. Eddie raised over £200,000 for Sports Relief. Read the rest of this blog by clicking here.

What is the relevance of this Q&A? Our client wanted us to mention Eddie’s amazing triumph and said if we could link this story successfully, then we were truly amazing!

______________________________________________

So, if you’re having a problem thinking of something to blog about, you know who to call …

Vicky Vaughan, managing director of The Brand Surgery has just published her book, DO A MADONNA!™, and it seems her writing talent is perfect for blogging. So if you are thinking about having a new website, apart from it having an excellent brand image and logo, you will want your shop to be found after all that hard work. Therefore, give us a call on 01903 824229 or email vicky@thebrandsurgery.co.uk to add a blog to your existing website. We can brand it up to look exactly like your current website.

DO A MADONNA website designed by The Brand Surgery

At long last, the original brand doctor, Vicky Vaughan’s book, ‘DO A MADONNA!‘ is complete. DO A MADONNA! is being printed right now!

DO A MADONNA! has had it’s first review.

“Everything in DO A MADONNA! is so true! I’ve read many other branding books, but DO A MADONNA! looks at branding in an entirely different way and it is so easy to digest. I work as part of the sales team for the Shropshire Star and I shall be recommending this book to all of my sales colleagues.” Debbie Marks-Rumble, Shropshire Star.

DO A MADONNA! focuses on keeping your brand alive. Vicky says: “It takes much more than plonking a new logo on a new brochure or website. You are your business and this ten-step book will help you on your way to business success. DO A MADONNA! is a handy-sized book which will help you discover the ten secrets of successful branding.

When you buy my book, you will also have access to the DO A MADONNA! toolbox which contains tips on colour psychology, plus much more! You will learn that even well known companies make branding blunders. DO A MADONNA! will teach you how to learn from their mistakes.

It’s time to get your business Into the Groove and Express Yourself! Once you’ve read the book and discovered the secret to branding, your business will be good enough to grace the cover of Vogue! Buy my book and let your journey to WORLD DOMINATION begin.”

DO A MADONNA! is very reasonably priced at JUST £9 and 5% of all book profits go towards Madonna’s charity: http://www.raisingmalawi.org

Go to www.doamadonna.com to pre-order your book. There will shortly be an e-book version of DO A MADONNA!

If you would like to have some personal branding advice, call Vicky Vaughan at The Brand Surgery, branding agency in West Sussex on 01903 824229.

Get your branding in tip-top shape

Three beauty treatments for your brand, from The Brand Surgery, branding agency based in Worthing, West Sussex

Lite branding package: Non-surgical treatment package!

This package is ideal for smaller businesses who may simply want to ‘freshen’ up their logo. What is included: Our award-winning designers will refresh your existing logo and bring it up-to-date through a secret blend of font and shape evolvement. No research is included. Only £585 incl. VAT. Upgrade to Lite Design & Print Package: lite logo design, roll-up banner, stationery, flyer design and print, all for only £2350 incl. VAT

Rejuvenation programme: Heavy detox!

Our award-winning designers will give your business a complete re-brand which will include five logo designs and web-based research on your competitors and target market. This package includes two set of client amendments. We currently have very good discounts on brochures and leaflets to complement your logo. Phone 01903 824229 for further details. This package starts from £1200 incl. VAT.

Intensive care package: Stretch marks and scar removal!

Ideal for established businesses who have brochures so old that the moths fly out! Our award-winning team will look at your entire business image. This package includes branding consultation including focus group advice, research, logo design. Corporate branding toolbox add-ons available. Call 01903 824229 for further information. Prices start from £2500 incl. VAT.