A letter to Lord Alan Sugar

Dear Lord Sugar,

We love The Apprentice here at Dynam. We rooted for Roisin all the way through the 2014 season until she lost out at the interview stage - not helped by a poor business idea.

We feel smug along with the rest of the nation as we watch the weekly business challenges, knowing that if we were on the show, we would have obviously gone about it in a much more effective way.

However, Lord Sugar, we have one complaint!

As a creative agency, we pride ourselves on delivering top quality design, branding and web work for our clients. This can take a while: there are initial client meetings, in-house discussions and brainstorming by the designers and copywriters. We present ideas to the client, go back and make amends until everyone is happy.

The similarities between this process and the way it is depicted in The Apprentice are few and far between. We appreciate that time is tight during the process but we do feel that we are misrepresented…. at no point do we invite the client into the studio to stand over our designers saying ‘Move this image here’ or ‘Could you just make that box smaller and change the colour of this text’. Nor is it usually the client that comes up with headlines for adverts or stock photography for a website: that’s what they’re paying us for.

So, Lord Sugar, our plea for 2015: please, please, please can you show how the design process works in the actual business world? We would be most grateful if you could right the wrongs of the last ten seasons of your show and show that we design folk are:

1) Skilled and qualified professionals who are paid for our expertise

2) Not just mute head-nodders with Photoshop and interesting haircuts (though we do have both of these things).

Thank you.

Yours sincerely,

Dynam.