- Studeum says students to me.
- Latin (?) a touch pompous, at least prima facie ;-)
- Foreignness of first word makes me question how to pronounce second: like English “creative,” or is it something like “cray-ah-TEEV”?

great thoughts. anymore welcomed.

i’m not a big fan of latin or fake latin in contemporary names.
it obfuscates instead of informing.

unless your studio specializes in baroque anachronistic styles, keep it real.

smiling emoticon.

cool. thanks ch.

i dont like, basically for the same reasons up there.

does it help?

dr

You also have the issue of, if someone reads it in a very literal American english style rather than fake Latin, it is “Stud Iam Creative”. Unless you’re focusing on design for porn or animal husbandry, it’s probably a bad idea to name your company with “stud” as the first syllable.

I wouldn’t make a too big issue of that.
More and more people claim to be offended by perfectly normal terms such as “assessment” or “analysis”. Now we should add “studio” to the list of banned words?

.. Well, perhaps only in the US.

No, not studio, but a fake word like “studeum” that has no real English pronunciation (only a fake Latin one) is pretty easy to be read the wrong way.

A “studeum” sounds like an arena with all-nude oil wrestling. No naming company in a million years would let you get away with it, for good reason.

Don’t forget the lesson we learned in the past decade about how a very clear name can get pronounced in unfortunate and unprofessional ways when it goes beyond the controlled environment of a business card and letterhead.

A consulting company called “the Experts Exchange” sounds reliable, but if you go to www.expertsexchange.com, you might expect to be sold hormone supplements and saline implants, not advice on tax shelters. A few spaces can mean the difference between professional respect and being the butt of dirty jokes. Nobody is going to hire the Expert Sex Change people to revamp their accounting system, regardless of their qualifications or references.

As people who often work with identities, this is the sort of worst-case scenario we’re supposed to be looking for and trying to avoid as part of our responsibility to clients. Even putting a harmless name into foreign dictionaries just to make sure it doesn’t mean something horrible in Turkish or Swahili is standard procedure. I mean, I don’t want to be the marketing guy in Finland who has to explain to my boss what Jussipussi means in English and why it was a bad brand name for our bread.

Stew Diem Creatif

Make sure you list Stew as one of the studio principals

Here are some latin translations for “creative”

partum, peperi, pario, genero

Perhaps you should go the true latin route

Great feedback everyone. Thank you very much. This has really helped.

Yea...

“Foreignness of first word makes me question how to pronounce second: like English “creative,” or is it something like “cray-ah-TEEV”?”

I thought the same thing. Not really a fan.

“Great feedback everyone. Thank you very much. This has really helped”

> how? what do you decide? will you go on with this one?

dr

my thoughts on it.

Latin is an old, dead language. when used, to me at least, it invokes an association with the roman empire and simpler times. I think some of the most beautiful poetry was written in latin, and I’m reminded of conquerors and poets.

Graphic design is a relatively new thing. Not too long ago it was called ’graphic arts’ and has been called ’corporate arts’ before that. To me, taking a modern job and concept and applying it to an antiquated language is an anachronism. Out of place in time.

It’s like painting the mona lisa with an iPod and trying to pass it off as valid. I mean yeah, everyb’dy’s got an iPod, and yes, the Mona Lisa was a woman, so by that logic she must have had one right?

I think the first time guilds of artists (sculptors, painters and the like) appeared on the scene would be likely in italy. Check out Florentian and Venetian art history (which you should know anyway) and you’ll see how the guild system worked.

Maybe, it’s a stretch for sure, but maybe the language that would best suit this would be italian, but because there are still italians running around today, all of the non-italians will likely assume you’re italian and operate your business in that language as well. Or else italians will incessantly talk to you in italian because you have an italian name.

So, maybe other languages as fun as they are sometimes, don’t suit our industry as well as they would other fields.

For advice on a creative name, I’d start with this: how many people are in your studio? If it’s just you, use your name, make it a beautiful, classy, elegant design and use your name. If you’re John Anderson, you could use Anderson design, and even if you hire 50 people, the name still works, where ’John Anderson design’ begins to break down.