Some of you may know the history of DropSend. Basically, we had to change the name from DropBox to DropSend because we didn’t get the trademark (anyone see a pattern developing here?).
Due to recent events we’ve been thinking about DropBox again and how we felt when the name was refused. And also how we dealt with the name change. Looking back, I think that the name change worked out in our favour. If we hadn’t named the app DropBox then I don’t think we would have thought to use a box in the logo.
If we had started the design process with the name DropSend then it’s likely we may have used some kind of swoosh, or envelope maybe? We certainly wouldn’t have started with a box. Now that we have the box - coupled with the words drop + send - it makes you think that you might drop your large file in a box and send if off.
It works. It adds depth. And it illustrates that losing the trademark doesn’t mean game over for the logo.
We chose a URL, it’s www.heyamigo.net
It wasn’t difficult to come up with this. We knew that it was HeyAmigo as soon as we thought of it. Predictably though the .com was already taken by these guys. Don’t you just hate it when that happens?
Now obviously the .com would have been better but it’s not available so we were faced with a choice. Do we settle for a URL that is clearly substandard, like amigoonline.com, or gotamigo.com (apologies to those who have any URL with ‘got’ infront of it). Or we could stick with our first choice, fly in the face of fashion and hope that no-one notices, or cares that it’s not a .com.
Selfishly, we sought to gratify our own pleasures and went with the .net.
We’ve had a mixed response. The average comment is (sucking air through teeth noise) “aaaah .net?” or “I’m not sure about the .net, couldn’t you get the .com?”.
So there we have it. This one error could be the ruination of all our plans to take over the world one web app at a time. Or….people may not give a shit. Our money is on the latter.
Click the header to watch the video clip.
(more…)
Clickety click*
Click fest
Click jam
Click stick
Trapdoor
Trader Bob *
Bid Pod
ListoPod *
Clickswitch
Billpod
Clickable *
UHug
The one with stars are those we liked best.
Jason was supposed to start the design work tomorrow and Gill and I still hadn’t picked a name for the web app. Argh!
The good news is that we had a meeting in London, so we had a good four hours in the car to brainstorm. Driving is perfect for brainstorming. In fact, I think most of Carson Systems’ good ideas have come from Gill and I driving somewhere and throwing around ideas.
We tried to think about what the software was going to do, and we came up with a bunch of short words. For some reason, I had the idea of trying to use a French word, instead of an English word. The web app is based on creating relationships, so we thought “Kiss” would be good, for which the French word is “bisou”. I thought the phonetic spelling of “Beezoo” would be good.
We knew what we didn’t want. We didn’t want a name that didn’t mean anything. A lot of people think that once you get a product to market and everyone knows what it is then the name doesn’t matter (like Google). We agree (if you’re Google) but we also think that using a name that is basically gobbledegook makes it harder in the beginning for people to identify with your product. And to some extent makes it harder for us as the creators to pin down a personality (hey we’re all about making life easy!). So we decided we didn’t want a ‘nonsense’ name.
The other thing we didn’t want was to find two words that meant something and put them together to make the app name example Drop and Send = DropSend, or Blink-Sale, Num-Sum. We like the name DropSend (and we like and use the other apps) but we didn’t want our name to be pigeonholed as a ‘type 1′ web app name. Come on, you have to roll with the times!
So from playing around with various words that conjoured up “relationships” we came up with “Amigo”, and we both liked it (a rare occurrence during this particular meeting).
After thinking hard about all the angles, and if there were any major flaws with the name, we decided to keep it.
Full steam ahead with the branding, maybe Jason will use these South American banana stickers as a starting point. Or maybe not!