Protect Your Brand

Posted on November 12th, 2009 by admin in Articles

We recently announced that we have protected our business and brand by trademarking our name. In increasingly competitive times, we thought we could help give some useful advice about the importance of protecting your brand. As a creative communications agency we are used to creating and launching new brands. Branding is much more than just a logo, identity or name. It reflects the total personality of your business and can refer to anything from a unique mark, word, colour or font. Your company branding is usually the first thing people associate with your business, and as we all know, first impressions count! The idea of protecting your brand is becoming more popular as the small business marketing place becomes more saturated and the best business names become less available. More and more people are starting their own business and protecting your business from possible infringement is becoming more common-place.

A good place to start when exploring the rather scary world of Intellectual property is the Intellectual Property Office. This site offers a wealth of information on how to take the necessary steps to protect your mark, logo or brand. On the flip-side, anyone wishing to start a business can do worse than to check out this site, to make sure that they are not about to infringe another companies trademark. Many new start-ups do not realise that Companies House will let you register a business name very similar to an existing business. Whilst this is fine from an incorporation perspective, you could be, without knowing it, infringing an existing trademark. Why Companies House and the IPO do not collaborate to help businesses avoid such a scenario is rather short-sighted.

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Streamline with Streamtime….

Posted on October 27th, 2009 by admin in Articles

As a small Creative design agency we are constantly looking at ways to streamline our processes, to help us track projects, quotes, invoice and manage our time. Over the past few weeks we’ve been looking at a number of systems to help manage our design studio more effectively. For us there was the decision whether to go with an application or online based system. Products like Basecamp represent the online route and offer a strong project management led system based around a collaborative tool. On the application side, there are products like Streamtime which offer a secure server side application and studio management software. After several weeks of trials and testing of these systems it was clear that both of these had their individual strengths. I was impressed by the collaborative nature of Basecamp, though I always had reservations about how an online tool of this nature could impact communication by discouraging people to communicate by phone or face to face. Perhaps for truly global businesses where meeting in this was is less important Basecamp could offer a unique take on online communication. For our design agency however, communication is key. Our process is very user centric and therefore discussions by phone and face to face are of primary importance. What we wanted was a tool to support our internal processes, a tool to help us streamline our business. Streamtime certainly seems to offer this and much more. It allows, job tracking, job quoting invoicing and live reporting. We look forward to integrating Streamtime into our busy design studio and we hope it will live up to our high expectations.

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