Company Name Preference?

[tonyhoward]

I am an architect and thinking of a new start up company that will offer architectural 3D visualisation services. Would you mind spending one minute completing a survey ranking the five named options specified in your order of preference by clicking the link below. Thanks.

 

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/FCVRDBC

[Nic H]

couldnt vote sorry cos all the names were absolutely awful

[John Dollus]

give this a go:

http://www.bandnamemaker.com/

[marius e]

have to agree, no good names there, cant vote for those...

[RyderSK]

I find it kind of funny when people from start consider company branding necessary. I find it sometimes downright appalling when single-man compananies refer to themselves as "we" on website...I mean who gets fooled..

 

Unless you of course from head start also already have employees and partners. But if not, then don't. It's fake and appears weird.

Single freelancers (even with subcontractors) are doing more than good and have certain charm that company doesn't. Peter Guthrie refers to himself as Peter Guthrie for past 10 years, and didn't feel the necessity to spawn into "Swedish home-made visuals" or whatever.

 

If one truly wants to be a company, then the name needs to be honest, and helps if good story is behind it. D-Box (architectural class from college the founding partners shared), Mir (russian satelite "peace", founding partners used to send little metal stuff to potencial clients ), Luxigon (drunk vision in morning refering to LighWave) all have awesome names and stories connected to them. It feels authentic and original and creates strong brand coupled with work. It just connects.

 

Worst of all is the anglo-saxon tradition from lawyers "Dumbass and Dumbass2", since our bussiness really isn't that serious (it somehow works for certain Ad agencies if they have really cool names, but this mostly came with looong tradition, and these companies were actually founded in times where such name made sense,ie. 60 years ago). Even worse is the shoe-seller syndrome "Dan, son and company" or whatever.

 

Don't care about name, I wasn't able to come up with good name in year and my bussiness doesn't suffer anyhow. Neither logo (and not even functional website at the moment lol). Good work is more important, than comes branding. Not oppositly

Edited June 25, 2013 by RyderSK

[notamondayfan]

I find it kind of funny when people from start consider company branding necessary. I find it sometimes downright appalling when single-man compananies refer to themselves as "we" on website...I mean who gets fooled..

 

Couldn't agree more, and as a single freelancer I would never call myself "We". The main reason being if a client did ask how many people I have working for me, it would be incredibly awkward back-tracking trying to explain that I'm actually just 1 man. And to be honest some people prefer working with a freelancer than a company as it's more personal and cuts out a lot of the layers which exist in larger companies.

 

As for names, it took me over a year to come up with a name I was happy with. In the end I used the last 3 letters from my surname. I wanted something connected to me, not corporate, and something short, so this for me fitted well.

 

Dean

[cafric1]

I voted, but it was tough since I couldn't vote them all bad. Try and come up with more.

[Scott Schroeder]

Just use the royal we, the majestic plural if you will: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Majestic_plural

 

If the client thinks they are dealing with royalty, or the Pope, they will respect you. Or talk in 3rd person. This works quite well.

 

For a name might I humbly suggest "Stinking Fish Renders"? Your slogan can be, "With a name this bad, our service has to be good!"

[Ernest Burden III]

I find it kind of funny when people from start consider company branding necessary. I find it sometimes downright appalling when single-man compananies refer to themselves as "we" on website...I mean who gets fooled..

 

Maybe not fooled so much as informed? Kinda. There was a turning point in the rendering field ten or so years ago, where half of work was now being done digitally vs. traditional media. In traditional media clients wanted 'just the guy' to do the painting and were worried that their picture would be done by a studio hire. But when they wanted something digital, they wanted a company, they saw this as a benefit. So there was reason to go with a little Royal 'we' to get work. I had to bridge the two and had to do a re-branding from 'guy with a pencil' to 'guy with a mouse'--I mean 'great big studio full of coffee-slugging 24 year olds with Star Wars toys all over their work areas'. So to make the point to clients that the work would be what they called 'digital', I chose a name with 'digital' in it. Not clever but clear as I could make it.

[heni30]

Or do what corporate does. I was reading about brain storming sessions for car model names and what they do is bring in a couple of ad idea guys,

a linguist, and English Phd, a poet, (with a rapper thrown in probably) etc and they get down to business kicking around ideas. They come up with a bunch of names and immediately copyright them so that no one else can use them even if they don't use them themselves. Cars really went from action jackson names like Cougar, Mustang, Barracuda, Charger to abstract names like elantra, sentra, altima, tersel, that sounded seductive and exotic - pure sound and devoid of meaning. It would be interesting to find out exactly when and how that came about.

 

I got one - Digitalia renderings. A chuckle puts clients in a good mood and facilitates their opening up their fat wallets.

Edited June 27, 2013 by heni30