The Design Council has admitted that designers are having a 'tough' time in the current economic climate in response to the news broken by The Drum that over 150 design agencies had applied for the £5,000 tender to rebrand Creative England.

Earlier this week, it was discovered that from over 150 applicants, a shortlist of five agencies had been drawn up to work on the new brand identity for the organisation.

Chief Design Officer for the Design Council, Mat Hunter, commented: “Times are tough for designers at the moment, and whilst this response to a £5k brief may indicate that they are chasing all work, no matter how small - it may equally reflect the fact that working with a major client such as Creative England would significantly boosts the credentials of any design consultancy. It also means that Creative England has a wealth of design talent to choose from.”

The successful agency will be chosen by the end of January.

Following criticism of the tender, Andy Jones from Creative England responded on The Drum's website by explaining; "For the tender, we asked for expressions of interest backed up by, in essence, the first four pages of each companies standard pitch document containing creds/examples of previous work. No design work was asked for upfront and 99% of the proposals did exactly this.

"Budgets are tight currently and therefore we stated what we could afford to spend. We did not expect 150 responses or expect responses from big agencies with large overheads and in no way was this meant as a muscle flexing exercise to get some design work 'on the cheap'.

"We've short-listed five companies who we will go and meet over the next couple of weeks to discuss this particular project further (for the smaller amongst them) and also potentially more some other pieces of work in the future once the Regional Growth Fund has been through due diligence and the 'Digital Champions' projects get under way.

"The aim was to be open, avoid the nepotistic behaviour that has been the cause for complaint in the past and most importantly give an opportunity to a small agency/designer," he concluded.