What the hell do I call my company?
It’s a stupid little thing that I absolutely hate obsessing over. It’s such a ridiculous detail. But I need to get business cards printed. I need to put up a website and get email working.
I do want something I won’t mind seeing and saying a million times in the future. It has to lend itself to an easily understandable domain name when spoken. I should be interesting but not obscure. And it wouldn’t hurt if it was meaningful about about a new stage/change. Maybe something meaningless, but interesting?
I’ve never liked the idea of naming your company after yourself. Too many people assume you work by yourself. And most people I know who use their name have a hard time separating their business from themselves.
Among the “this is a new stage/thing in my life” ideas, I’ve only really had two half decent ones: Breakaway Design and Dream Designs.
I considered Emanon as a cop-out, but rather quickly discarded it. (Emanon = NoName).
Having loved William Gibson’s last book, Pattern Recognition, I half considered using Blue Ant. It falls well on the meaningless category. I do think you need to be careful with the meaningless, though.
I’m trying to think of anything from any book I loved. Not a whole lot of usable names, though, for a respectable business. Especially as most of my reading lately has been cyberpunk. Would you do business with Chiba Design or DatAmerica? I don’t think so.
I have a friend who used Serif Design. Some little professional word is interesting. But outside of serif… what is there? Pica Design? T-square communications? Maybe Ligature?
(I actually kind of like that last one)