Simon Popper, Ulysses, [a reinterpretation of James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) rearranging all the words in the original book in alphabetical order], Privately Printed by Die Keure, Brugge/Bruges, 2006, Limited Edition of 1000 [Motto Books, Geneva]

Naming is hard. Names, after all, are perhaps the most indelible artifacts of the product creation process. Brands are redesigned with a lustrum regularity and codebases are continually rewritten and replaced but a name, for better or worse, usually sticks.

That’s because a good name is a hook that sets itself into a person’s mind, linking their brain back to your idea – try to reset the hook and you risk losing the connection. The process of naming, then, is the process of neatly packaging up that idea, discovering where it begins and ends so it can be linked as a discrete, easily remembered concept.

A good name can help a company or product become successful, of course, but it can also help the lowliest code library find an audience, help formalize an informal process, and propel ideas about the world toward becoming talking points throughout it.

And yet, what tools do we use for naming? What methodology? Many of us practice it informally, doing our best with thesauruses and domain name searches, never stopping to formalize an approach because it seems so devilishly simple – all you really need is a word or two in a language you’ve probably been using your entire life.

But like any art form, naming benefits from rich tools and processes, and this site is meant to help you discover them – to provide a starting point for anyone who needs to name something. That is: everyone, because every idea benefits from a good name.

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