Before I write a single line of code, before I pick a colour palette or sketch a layout, before I do any of the things that feel like building - I name the thing. And that naming process is, without exaggeration, the hardest part of making anything. It's also the most important. Because the name isn't a label you stick on at the end. The name is the first design decision. It shapes everything that follows.
I've named fourteen projects now. Fourteen things that needed to exist on the internet with a word or two that told you what they were, what they felt like, and why you should care. For each one that shipped with a name I was happy with, I rejected fifty or more alternatives. Names scribbled in notes apps at midnight. Names that sounded brilliant for three hours and then completely hollow by morning. Names that were already taken. Names that were available but felt wrong in a way I couldn't articulate. The graveyard of rejected names is vast and I visit it often.
Why Modern Retro works
Modern Retro is the project I'm most proud of naming. Two words that contain the entire concept. Modern - it's about brands that exist now, technology companies, streaming services, things that are unmistakably of this moment. Retro - rendered through the lens of 1970s retail, the shopfronts and signage and display windows of a completely different era. The tension between those two words is the whole project. You don't need to see a single image to understand what Modern Retro is about. The name does the work.
That name came quickly, which is rare. Most good names take weeks. But sometimes the concept and the language arrive together, perfectly matched, and you know immediately that you've found it. There's a physical feeling to it - a small click of satisfaction, like a lock finding its key. You stop searching. You stop trying alternatives. You just know.
The reason Modern Retro works is that it describes a tension rather than a thing. It isn't literal - it doesn't tell you "AI-generated images of brands as 1970s shops." It tells you the feeling. Modern and retro at the same time. Old and new colliding. That tension is interesting. It makes you want to look. A literal name - "70s Brand Shop Generator" - would tell you more and make you care less.
The Trove principle
Trove took longer. It started life in my head as a bookmarking tool, and I spent weeks trying names that gestured at bookmarks, at saving, at collecting. None of them worked because none of them captured what the project actually was. It wasn't a bookmarking tool. It was a taste engine - a system for understanding yourself through what you choose to save. The function was secondary. The identity was primary.
Once I understood that, the name became easier. Trove - a collection of valuable things, a hoard of treasures. Not a filing cabinet. Not a clipboard. A trove. Something precious. Something personal. Something that reveals who you are by what it contains. The word does more work than any tagline could. It tells you this isn't about productivity or organisation. It's about discovery and self-knowledge.
There's a principle I've arrived at through painful repetition: name the identity, not the function. CultureTerminal isn't "Culture RSS Feed." It's a terminal - a place where signals arrive, a dashboard for cultural information, something that feels alive and operational. Taste OS isn't "Brand Scoring Tool." It's an operating system - a framework for running taste, something that implies both structure and power. The functional description is boring. The identity name is magnetic.
The naming gauntlet
Every name I consider has to pass a gauntlet of tests, most of them instinctive rather than systematic. Can I say it out loud without feeling stupid? Does it look good written down? Is the domain available? Does it work as a URL without looking like a jumble of letters? Can someone hear it once and remember it? Does it suggest what the thing does without explaining it? Is there room for the project to grow beyond its initial scope without the name becoming a cage?
That last one matters more than people think. A name that's too specific traps you. If I had called CultureTerminal "Music and Design News Aggregator," what happens when I want to add food writing or architecture criticism or film reviews? The specific name becomes a lie. The evocative name stays true because it was never making a literal promise - it was making an atmospheric one.
What the advertising world taught me
I spent years in advertising watching naming happen at scale. Brand names, campaign names, product names - all going through rounds of consumer testing, trademark searches, linguistic analysis, and committee reviews. And what I learned is that most of that process makes names worse, not better. The best names come from conviction, not consensus. They come from someone who understands the thing deeply enough to find the one word that captures its essence.
Nike didn't come from a focus group. Google didn't come from a naming consultancy. Spotify didn't emerge from consumer testing. These names worked because they were bold and specific and chosen by people who understood what they were making. The committee process - where everyone gets a vote and every concern gets accommodated - produces names like "Alphabet" for a company that's obviously still called Google. Consensus smooths every edge off a name until it becomes a pebble. Smooth, inoffensive, forgettable.
My process is the opposite of a committee. It's me, alone, usually late at night, with a notes app and a domain search engine and an unreasonable level of stubbornness. I try a name. I live with it for a day. I type it into a browser bar. I say it out loud in a fake conversation: "Have you seen Trove?" "I just updated CultureTerminal." If it survives twenty-four hours of this treatment, it might be the one. If I wake up and the first thing I think is "that name is wrong," it was never the one.
The name shapes the design
What most people miss about naming: it isn't separate from design. It's the beginning of design. When I named CultureTerminal, the word "terminal" immediately suggested a visual direction - green-on-black, data-rich, operational, alive. The name contained the aesthetic. When I named Taste OS, the word "OS" immediately suggested interface patterns - scoring systems, frameworks, dashboards. The name contained the interaction model.
This is why naming comes first. If I had designed CultureTerminal before naming it, I might have made something soft and editorial and magazine-like. The name "terminal" pushed the design in a more interesting direction - harder, more functional, more alive. The name was a creative constraint, and constraints are where good design lives.
Every project I build now starts with the same question: what's it called? Not what does it do, not who's it for, not what technology should I use. What's it called? Because once I have the name, I have the identity. Once I have the identity, I have the design direction. Once I have the design direction, I have the product. The name is the seed. Everything else grows from it.
So I'll keep spending unreasonable amounts of time on names. I'll keep rejecting fifty options for every one I choose. I'll keep typing candidates into browser bars at midnight and saying them out loud in empty rooms. Because naming things is hard. And it matters more than anyone thinks. The name isn't a label. It is the foundation. Get it right and everything else becomes easier. Get it wrong and you spend the life of the project fighting against a word that never quite fit.
