A field guide to naming things

People ask me to name things because I draw letters, and they assume the two are related. They are, a little. A name is something you will see set in type thousands of times, and some names look better set than others. But most of the work happens before anything is drawn.

Start with what it does, not what it is

The first page of my notes is never a list of names. It is a list of verbs: what the thing does for the people who use it. A bakery feeds, warms, wakes up a street. A scheduling tool clears, fits, makes room. Verbs lead to images, and images lead to names far more often than adjectives do.

Write a lot of bad candidates

I write at least a hundred candidates, most of them terrible, in one sitting. Editing while writing kills the strange ones, and the strange ones are where the good names hide. The second sitting is for crossing out.

The tests

A name that survives the first cut goes through five tests. It has to pass all of them.

1. Say it on the phone. Can someone who hears it once spell it? If you have to add “with a K”, it costs you every time.
2. Set it in type. Lowercase, capitals, small. Some letter combinations crowd or gape. A name with a lot of round letters looks friendly; one with a lot of verticals looks stern.
3. Put it in a sentence. “I bought it at ___.” “We use ___ for that.” A name that only works as a logo fails here.
4. Search for it. Not for the domain, for the meaning. You want to know what else it already means to people.
5. Wait a week. Names that were exciting on Monday are often embarrassing by Friday. The ones that are still fine are usually the ones that last.

What to avoid

Descriptive names feel safe and age badly, because the thing they describe tends to change. Invented words feel distinctive and are hard to remember unless they are short. The names that hold up best are real words used slightly out of place: a word that belongs to another trade, another century, another room.

That is also, more or less, how this journal got its name.