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"I will not ever go near naming a company ever again." That is literally the exact phrase I told a client yesterday. And I mean it with every piece of my whole body. After 4 naming projects this year, I'm throwing in the towel.

Naming a company is a job best left to people who name stuff for a living. Those naming firms charge at minimum between $30,000-$50,000 for their lowest tier of services, and if you ask me, they rightfully earn every penny they make. What's so dreadful about naming a company? EVERYTHING.

First of all, and most importantly, naming a company is a highly emotional exercise. For all intensive purposes, you are either naming a person's dream, or re-naming a person's nightmare (when companies go south and need to "protect the innocent"). Could you imagine being paid to name your cousin? It's too intimate, too personal. Emotional experiences breed irrational thinking. I'm ok with high emotions- I have some high emotions myself when it comes to functioning in the world- but it's the irrational thinking that is the deal-breaker. That's numero dos.

As a designer, my creative process can best be described as a funnel. Unlike the post-Carson "everything but the kitchen sink" approach, I have a modernist edge to me that still believes in distilling and simplifying. In a normal project, I'll take all of the content, take the design brief, and take my notions, and start cross-breeding them. I'll see if there are new combinations of ideas that have never happened yet. I'll also stay true to the content, because I believe the best ideas are found from within (they also tend to stand the test of time longer than external solutions.) In the end, you'll have an exciting new interpretation of all of the stuff with which we started. Naming doesn't—can't—work like that. You need thousands of loose strands of ideas, from the wacky to the absurd to find a good name. It's the metaphors, idiomatic expressions, clichés, and non-sequitors that really sing. Trying to control and harness that non-funnel approach, and the client behind it, is a job unto itself. That's the thing: in naming, subjectivity is king, so anything goes. What might be great one day on a conference call sits and stews over a few days until suddenly the client claims the word "looks French instead of Italian," even though the word doesn't mean anything; it's a fake word I invented last night at 2am before the presentation. You can't rationalize the right name in a meeting: it just has to "feel" right, look right ("I hate that G!") and pronounce right.

The final nightmare of the naming world is that even if you've found one, you might not be able to use it. You have to send it through lawyers, trademark offices, and all kinds of bureaucracies to see if it hasn't been chosen already. That's why you end up with wacky spellings like Flickr for company names. Oh, and on that note—good luck finding a URL address that works!!

In the end, $50,000 dollar naming companies have a massive advantage because they are charging $50,000. Suddenly, their opinion matters, because there is a whomping price-tag associated with it. So as for me, I'm sticking with the logos. Logos for $50,000.00.