What’s In a Name? »
Coming up with the name ‘lilula’ was a difficult venture. A quick brainstorm started with words to describe my personality. I ended up with a lot of variations of the word ‘obnoxious’ and ‘repetitious’ — what ensued was a long journey into the world of semantics. It sounds horrible (and possibly painful) but I love words and the experience was definitely an education.
I considered using an unusual noun but then how would it be connected to my identity? Did I want people to know me as the blogger with the potentially offensive alias, or Lilian? Is the name of the author an important part of the identity?
Staying with the unusual noun theme, I researched the word ‘flux’. Google it and you get a directory of designers who were too cliché to come up with a more unique name. To me, the word ‘flux’ was meant to represent online personality fluctuations — not very personal and far too academic.
After that disappointment, I figured I would look at the names of design and art orientated websites to get the cogs turning. My research returned an overflow of ‘creative’, ‘design’ and ‘inspiration’ — words which would drown me in a search. In conclusion, designers do not use thesauruses.
Eventually I began to toy with the sounds of my own name. I discarded my initials since I find them typographically hideous — LT, anyone? I found that by fusing the vowels of my names that I got a rhythmic, memorable and highly personal word — bingo! I will be posting my resources and process in the near future.
If your domain bears some significance to your blog content, yourself or your business, then how did you come up with the name? Any tips and tricks you might like to share? Alternatively feel free to share any interesting words for brands, blogs, bands, etc.
My domain name is very unoriginal and uninspired. It was chosen because I really really am bad at keeping a name for my blog. Also, at the time, my blog went by “I’ve Been Awake All Week.” And http://www.ivebeenawakeallweek.com? Er. I may as well have bashed my hands on a keyboard and picked that for all the good it would do as far as allowing people to remember it goes. This one is more adaptable to whatever I need to use it for, I find. :)
Well, I was one day at home when it was raining cats and dogs, and suddenly the word tormentoso popped up in my head. Besides it goes well with my personality, cause I’m really calmed sometimes and suddenly I burst…
How would you pronounce it though? I’m thinking of leeh-looh-lah (lilula in Spanish, of course) every time I read it, but how do you pronounce it yourself?
Lilula » Blog Archive » The Name Game on September 27, 2008 at 3:43 pm
[...] I posted an entry on how I came to use the name ‘lilula’. Within it I promised a post with some tips and resources. This is that promised post [...]