Go name yourself

6 July 2020 Update: Go Name Yourself has arrived! You can pick up your deck here.

When I wrote Don’t Call It That, the goal was to walk people through a naming process start-to-finish. It was an experiment. I had named hundreds of businesses and products but I had never written a guide for people to do naming on their own. Since the first edition came out in 2013 I have received some great feedback from readers that I’ve incorporated to make the book more useful for everyone. I heard that readers wanted more examples and more detail about the technical aspects of the naming process. In the second edition I added vignettes from people who used the book to name their businesses and an interview with an intellectual property attorney (among many other updates and improvements). I’ve been working on the third edition of the book since December. Again, based on reader feedback, I’ve added several stories from real naming projects at A Hundred Monkeys, and have totally revamped the book’s exercises. It was in the process of working through the exercises with editor Rose Linke that we came up with another idea that I want to introduce now.

Go Name Yourself is a deck of cards for coming up with creative names.

While Don’t Call It That walks through all the ins and outs of the naming process, Go Name Yourself is about coming up with cool names in as many ways as possible. We’ve been working on the project since February and are excited to share it with all you friendly people.

One of the most common questions we get at A Hundred Monkeys is “Where do you actually find names?” This is a question without a simple answer. We find names all over the place. We find names in books and online and in conversation. If there were one place good names came from, we probably wouldn’t be in business. Go Name Yourself shares many of the ways we actually come up with names.

There’s certainly some overlap here. Part of this is recognizing that people like to work and solve problems in different ways. Don’t Call It That is a step-by-step process. Go Name Yourself is a creative exercise. They can be used separately or together.

Right now we’re working with Brooklyn-based Out of Office on the design of the deck. If this is something you’re interested in bringing to life, follow me on Kickstarter or subscribe to my very infrequent mailing list.You’ll be kept in the loop about Go Name Yourself and the upcoming third edition of Don’t Call It That.

More soon,