After yesterday’s terrific mention in Smashing Magazine, today has brought some more welcome recognition. Design Week, the industry’s major publication, features Spring on page three of their printed edition and online too.

Here’s the story in full:

Tory women are hoping to shake off their ’staid’ image with the help of Spring Design and Advertising.

The Conservative Women’s Organisation has briefed the Suffolk-based group to help it to attract more and younger members. It appointed Spring in January without a pitch.

‘We hope to alter the image that Conservative women are staid ladies who lunch, and show that we work at the coalface improving people’s lives through hard graft and charity work,’ says CWO chairwoman Pauline Lucas.

Spring is advising CWO on how to present itself to sponsors, but the organisation intends to brief Spring on a marketing campaign after the June European election.

This weekend marks the 30th anniversary of Margaret Thatcher’s accession as Prime Minister. Lucas claims that today, the CWO’s image is better represented by David Cameron’s wife Samantha than by the former PM.

Fingers crossed: tomorrow, we’ll be more popular than Swine Flu.

The Belvoir On For Britain blog has quickly become a firm favourite amongst those who know their cordials, and now the design community is full of praise too.

Today’s Smashing Magazine article, Showcase Of Elegant And Original Blog Designs, features the Belvoir blog.

According to Smashing Mag, our customised Wordpress blog for Belvoir Fruit Farms is:

A visually impressive blog with awesome typography. This design makes perfect use of an appealing and striking background image.

And who are we to argue? After all, Smashing Magazine has built a following of over 100,000 subscribers in fewer than three years by finding the most inspirational sites on the web and telling the design community all about them. So for Belvoir On For Britain to make it on to this prestigious site is a big compliment.

Designed by Spring’s Creative Director, James Kindred, this digital design uses a mix of textures, distressed brush strokes and desaturated hues to give it a very vintage feel. It’s then been expertly coded into a stunning Wordpress theme. (Wordpress being one of the most popular and powerful blogging platforms).

Belvoir On For Britain is only a couple of months old, but has already become a real success story for Spring and Belvoir Fruit Farms. We’re very proud of it, and a little bit of recognition from our peers is always jolly nice too.

Thanks, Smashing Mag!

No that’s not a typo – we are delighted to welcome the newest member of the Spring team, Aprille Matthews. Joining us from Choose Suffolk, English graduate Aprille will be working as production and PR assistant, in support of Simon Hazelgrove and Georgina Wroe.

Spring must be one of the few agencies which is recruiting rather than removing staff at this stage of the recession – but Spring has always been a time of growth and we find our workload growing daily.

Welcome, Aprille.