The Origin of Our Brand Name, Typogram

Week 77 of Founding Typogram

Hi friends, the next milestone for Typogram is a grand launch in April, so we have been super busy putting our heads down and getting to work. I’m working on bug fixing and popularly requested features from our users.

This week, enjoy one of my favorites from my newsletter archive, how we came up with our brand name, Typogram.

How we came up with brand name Typogram

The first step in building a successful brand is choosing a brand name. It impacts everything that follows, like designing a logo and brand guidelines. While Typogram is focused on solving the logo design problem, I thought it would be helpful to provide some advice on choosing a brand name, both from a fellow startup founder’s perspective and a brand expert’s perspective.

We struggled a lot with brand name, just like everybody else. Here is a list of names we brainstormed:

• Typographer app (typographerapp.com, typographer.app)

• Fontier

• Typosigner (typosigner.com)

• Typografi

• Typeplay (typeplay.com $2995)

• Fontplay 

• Fontly

• Typely

• Letterspace

• Type adjust (typeadjust.com)

• Type Nice

• StyleType (styletype.com $2000)

• Font-style (fontstyle.com $3595)

• Asterisk

• Font Membrane (fontmembrane.com)

• Superscript

• Pettie caps (pettiecaps.com)

• Dingbat

• Shengtype (shengtype.com)

• Typeish

• Typesh (typesh.com)

• Toggletype (toggletype.com)

• Stylisticset (stylisticset.com)

• Typher

• Sansa (sansaapp.com)

• Modulartype

• FontChannel (fontchannel.com)

• FontStation

Notice that we have researched the domain options for most of these names and marked the price — ensuring our brand name can pair up with an affordable domain was among our top priorities. 

Our expertise is typography, and we want to build a brand around this special sauce of ours — Type / Font. Logo design is the first idea we want to tackle, but our brand may expand to other areas, such as landing page design, iconography, and more. We want a brand name that tells the most important story about us — how we are different in tackling these problem sets; we pay extra attention to typographic details, and our solution will have better typography. We didn’t want to box ourselves in with a brand name too specific to things like logos. 

With a rough direction — Typography and Fonts, and a list of name ideas we feel “meh” about, we needed a new source of inspiration. I have a small library of graphic design books, and many have a glossary index at the end. It is like a mini-dictionary that contains only the relevant names and terms, which is perfect for us to look for inspiration:

Graphic design books have an index of glossary in the end

My co-founder and I were flipping through the glossary index of graphic design history books.

We found the term “Typogram” in Meggs’ History of Graphic Design

Typogram means a word written in a form that illustrates what it means, like these examples below:

Examples of Typograms

The term is a combination of “typo,” which stands for typography, and “-gram,” which means a graphic (my understanding), like a diagram, hologram, monogram, sonogram, or even “Instagram.” 

Because it is a relatively uncommon word — we scooped the domain “typogram.co” for ten years with less than $100! The word Typogram is not challenging to spell based on its pronunciation, making it easy to pass on through word of mouth. The term is also rare enough that it is easy to rank first on Google search. 

Now that I have shared my perspective as a fellow founder, what do you think of our brand name Typogram, founder to founder? We came up with it by flipping through Meggs’ History of Graphic Design; do you have an anecdote about how you came up with your startup name? 

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See you next week! If you have friends who are interested in founding startups, please consider sharing my newsletter with them!