Why we name things last
A name chosen in the first week has to carry ideas nobody has had yet.
- Written by
- Marta Soler
- Published
- Reading time
- 1 min read
Most clients arrive with a name already in mind, or with a deadline for one. We ask them to wait. Not because names are hard, though they are, but because a name chosen in the first week has to carry ideas nobody has had yet.
By the time we write the first list, we know how the company talks, what it refuses to be and which words its customers already use. The list gets shorter faster. The arguments get better.
Lists, not favourites
We write long lists, often three hundred names or more, and read them aloud in both studios. A name that only works on paper is not a name. A name that sounds wrong in Danish or Catalan usually sounds wrong somewhere else too.
Then we cut. Nobody is allowed a favourite until the list is down to ten. The ten go on the wall next to the work, set in the type we are testing, so the name is judged as part of something rather than on its own.
What a good name does
It is easy to say, hard to misspell and has room to grow. It does not describe the product, because products change. It sounds like it belongs to a person who means it.
Kotei came out of a list of more than four hundred. It was number two hundred and eighty one.
