Vizamp didn’t always have the name Vizamp. The product started life as a sandbox project in a folder titled ‘waves’. Something I played around with for fun in my spare time. As the project grew I started giving consideration to a better name and did what many people do and checked for available domain names. I quickly I came up with the name Graphica and found graphica.io was actually available. So the first incarnation of the app was born and named.
Some months went by, Graphica grew and I started to think about marketing. While I liked the name Graphica, I was worried about it for two reasons. First, Stephen Wolfram’s computer art venture from the late 90s, bares the same name at Graphica.com and is remarkably similar to what my Graphica was trying to be. A perfect example of how a seemingly original idea can be a blatant a rip-off of an existing one, even if conceived of completely uninfluenced. Secondly, the name Graphica is extraordinarily pervasive in the world. It seems like every small design firm out there wants to be called Graphica, which presents a mountain to climb in terms of making a brand footprint.
So I set about finding the perfect name. My process around doing this was fairly simple. I would list words closely associated with the product; visual, color, light, sound, etc. On the first pass over the list I tried to combine these words together. Alas everything was derivative sounding and anything remotely good was totally unoriginal. On the second pass I tried joining parts of words together with a misspelling here and there. This was more fruitful and in fact produced the name Vizamp, but for now it was sitting low on the list. Disheartened, I ploughed forward with the third strategy, where I added words that had an aesthetic but were unrelated to the concept. For example, ‘hummingbird’ was aesthetically a good fit due to its vibrant colors and unusual sound making abilities. Another productive idea generating strategy I found, was to type prospective names and concepts into Google images to get related imagery and hence words.
I ran through a list of about 50 names several times, removing least favorites and creating variations on names in the maybe pile. Throughout this process the name Vizamp stuck, however I didn’t think too deeply about it. It seemed a bit obvious and I was getting fixated on having some kind of animal or nature imagery in the name. But the more I whittled away at the list, the higher on the list Vizamp rose.
On one pass through I stopped and looked at it for a minute and considered “why isn’t this name going away? What’s so good about it? It has the word ‘viz’ for visualization (also singularly referred to as a ‘viz’ in the realm of music visualizers) and ‘amp’ to represent sound and music. Ok that’s pretty good actually but the name is probably unoriginal.” I checked for the availability of vizamp.com and unbelievably, it was available. A six-letter dot-com domain name, that fits my product perfectly, is just sitting there ready for the taking. I bagged it immediately.
Once acquired, I started to fall in love with the name. The word Vizamp is represented sparsely online so getting the top search result for the name would be a piece of cake, and it was. Also, I went through several iterations of the logo eventually settling on one that incorporates the V and A, which I’m supremely satisfied with.
And finally the part that made all of this fit together; the fact that Vizamp is a music visualizer and you create works of animated art called visualizations, or what are also referred to in the singular as a viz and in plural form as… um. Hmm! Ok we hit a snag here. What do I call multiple of these things? If I were being somewhat consistent with the English language I’d use vizzes (as in quizzes). All I can say to that is “yuck!” How about viz artwork? Nah, I don’t think so. Animations, visualizations, vizarts, vizzies , vizzos, vizz-a-roos…. Ahh!
As I got more into developing the product and writing about it, the problem of presenting a non-mouthful short form became insuperable. I didn’t want to abbreviate or use any of the awkward alternatives I came up with.
Finally I stumbled upon the solution, which was to do nothing. I was reviewing some code when I noticed a grammar mistake in a tooltip, which read ‘filter Viz I created’. I thought it sounded like something my Japanese wife would say with her penchant for dropping the letter s with plurals. I went to fix it but then stopped, thinking that it sounded pretty good. Why do I need to pluralize this word? It’s a neologism and English is a notoriously inconsistent language with plenty of precedent on having no s for plurals. Why can’t I make the aesthetic choice to not pluralize? And so I didn’t.