Brand-name design criteria — Part 4: spelling, sound & personal taste

The effect of spelling & pronunciation

Both are important factors for any good name. If you say your brand name on the phone all day, pronunciation becomes crucial. If customers must write it often, the spelling matters more — every time you read out an email with a hard or non-standard spelling, you tire of spelling it out.

There are times when misspellings work, and are even convenient. When URLs were hard to come by, companies named themselves Flickr, Digg or Dribbble — some of the best deliberately misspelled names. As more URLs became available, this grew less of a concern, and startups are less likely to use intentional misspellings now.

There are also times you want a name to be hard to pronounce. Perhaps you can confidently pronounce 'Yves Rocher.' Maybe that choice is strategic: a French name sounds chic, even expensive. The name works because it's inspiring. English Home also uses its hard pronunciation to advantage — its founder designed the name so the brand image would feel strong and British in Turkey. Because it's not native for Turkish speakers, it's harder to pronounce, and therefore sounds more English and more appealing.

So when naming, think about your brand's future: is it more important to have a name that's easy to spell and say, or is there a strategic reason for a harder one?

The power of sound

As discussed, memorable names can be built through onomatopoeia, rhyme and consonant use. But beyond that there is an aesthetic consideration. Synonyms should not be treated as interchangeable: in a dictionary 'stone' and 'rock' are synonyms — but they really aren't. How a word sounds matters; the sound changes the meaning.

Note that neither choice is 'better' — rock isn't necessarily better than stone, nor stone than rock. What matters is the difference in meaning you choose to accept. That difference is the association.

The effect of personal preference

Inevitably, you'll prefer certain kinds of names over others, and your preferences will differ from mine. You've pictured your company or product in a particular way for a while. Ask yourself:

• Do you want a name that means something, or one that means nothing?
• Do you want the name to be short?
• Do you want it to start with a particular letter?
• Do you want a real word or an invented one?
• Do you want the URL to match the name exactly?

Your preferences may be irrational or arbitrary — and that's fine; people often are. What matters most to you in a name? To create the best possible name, add any personal preferences to your criteria. Seeing them written down, you may realize a suggestion is unreasonable and reject it — or accept it as a legitimate concern and add it to the criteria guiding your work.