Advice

Pottery Class Story

The story goes like this: in a pottery class students were divided into two groups. Students in the first group were asked to make a perfect pot. Students in the second one were asked to make as many pots as they could. When all pots were compared it turned out that all the best pots were from the second group.

The story about a pottery class is from “Art and Fear” by David Bayles which I haven’t yet read. I’ve first stumbled upon it here.

I like it a lot because it takes the pressure off. I don’t have to create that one perfect drawing. It’s better to draw as much as I can without obsessing over a single drawing. I don’t need to write a perfect blog post either — the more I write the better I will get at it.

4 steps for finding a name

I wrote before that the crucial thing is doing the work, not worrying about a name. But you still have to actually find a name. Here I am noting down the process that I use to find names for my stores, websites, companies, and games. There are 4 steps:

1. Write down all the words that come to mind when you think about your project. But don’t make it a list. Write the words loosely on a page. This way you will see connections between them better.

A few words that come to mind when you think about your project.

2. Use a random word generator and get words that you like or that seem connected to the words on your page. I use this one.

3. To get a few more unique words go to — poems! They are the source of words that are not often used in everyday life. Read some poems and write down the words that catch your eye.

4. Look for unique word combinations. If none, repeat steps 2 and 3 until you have more words and then look for connections again.

Wolf, story, home, and other words - look for interesting combinations.

This is how my brother and I found the name for our game studio Manic Hyena and all our games.

How to name your store

When I opened one of my stores a few years ago, I planned to draw little foxes and put them on t-shirts and tote bags. It was supposed to be dark and weird art, the foxes would all be alone in forests and caves, at night. And it would be winter.

I named the store: Fox Shiver.

Here is the first fox that I painted:

After the initial spree of dreary fox designs, I somehow ended up drawing lots of cats. I didn’t make a second separate store for my cat designs — I just published them to my Fox Shiver store.

It would be great to have a thematically consistent store with a fantastic name. But what’s even better is to actually open a store with any name that comes to mind and start publishing and selling.

When you look around, you will notice that plenty of people didn’t overthink their store names either. Go through the stores on any of the websites, and you will see lots of artists who often used a combination of words that they liked or simply their name or nickname.

One of my favorite artists is Nathan W. Pyle. If you don’t know him, here is one of his designs: