Clients often arrive with a name already chosen and ask me to make it look good. Sometimes the name is fine. Sometimes it is the main problem, and no typeface will fix it.

A name is the first interface a company has. People meet it before the logo, the site or the product. They hear it in a sentence from a friend, type it into a search bar and try to spell it in an email. Each of those moments can fail.

Say it before you draw it

When Oka came to me, the working name was longer and had a silent letter. It looked elegant on the box. On the phone, the founders spelled it out every single time.

If you have to spell the name on every call, the name is costing you money.

We tested four options the cheap way. I read each one aloud in a normal sentence to ten people and asked them to write it down. Oka was written correctly ten times out of ten. The elegant one, three.

What I check

Naming feels like taste, but most of it can be tested. I run every candidate through the same short list before anyone falls in love.

• Can a stranger spell it after hearing it once?

• Does it survive being said quickly, in a noisy room?

• Is the domain or a clean variation available?

• Does it mean something awkward in the markets you plan to enter?

• Does it still work if the company adds a second product?

Packaging mock-ups with three candidate names. The shortest one won before design began.

Only names that pass go on to design. That order matters. A strong identity makes people attached to a weak name, and then nobody wants to change it.

Oka now fits on a small label, a shipping box and a favicon without a second thought. The founders tell me the best part is smaller than that. They no longer spell it out.