Names that work in systems

Naming lesson that stuck with me: good names behave inside systems. Search boxes. Keyboards. Voice and screen readers. Legal registers. Not just in a designer’s head. Orthography, phonotactics, and distinctiveness decide if a brand is findable, sayable, and protectable. 🏷️👇

Back in 2015 I wrote the basics: keep it simple, easy to say, and visually consistent. Avoid stunt spellings. Grab the domain before you fall in love. Aim for stickiness. I pointed at eBay’s casing, Google’s clean phonetics, and Apple paying $4.5M for A lot aged well. Some didn’t.

A 2025 model:

1. Distinctive vs descriptive. Stronger marks sit in suggestive or fanciful. Descriptive is easier to recall and harder to protect.
2. Form. Casing looks nice, yet many UIs flatten it. Design for zero typographic control.
3. Speech and search. Two clean syllables travel well. Avoid homophones. Autocorrect punishes stunt spellings. Handles and TLDs are scarce land. .com helps, mismatch hurts.

What changed since 2015:
• Alphabetical hacks died.
• Voice and AI made audio confusion a first order risk.
• New TLDs (.io, .ai) eased scarcity, but trust outside tech is mixed.
• Verbability helps culture and tempts genericide.
Meta is broad and suggestive. X is ultra minimal and ambiguous. Memorable is not the same as searchable. My surprise: casing rarely survives product UI and localization. Consistency wins.

Practical tests:

1. Say it to 5 people on a noisy call. Can they repeat it?
2. Dictate on iOS and Android. Same text?
3. Search in private mode. Do you outrank collisions?
4. Claim handles across 10 platforms. Any ugly compromises?
5. Run a knockout trademark search in core classes.

Open questions: optimize for speech to text first? accept a non .com outside tech? where’s the line between verbable and protectable?

More context: https://anandchowdhary.com/blog/2015/naming-brands