On Choices and Names

Wednesday, 13th January. Our group has decided to go all out with our Facebook app, or die trying~ In other words, Penguin Award, here we come!

It might seem strange that we're striving for the award given to the most spectacular failure... but it's not just that which we're aiming towards. Among us 4, we've bounced our dream FB apps off each other, grabbed a few ideas off different points made by different people, and have come up with a dream app that all of us, individually and as a team, aim and want to see through. And i think therein lies two very important points. Firstly, a team works much much better when everyone wants it for their own personal and professional pride, and not just because it's their job or they were coaxed by someone else onto the team. Secondly, dream big. It doesn't matter if you fail initially and / or repeatedly.

Despite starting early, our assignment Aspirations weren't complete till just before 11 pm yesterday, the day of the mid-assignment submission for the Facebook assignment. Not that we were lazy, but simply because that wasn't our priority. This was, and still is, the first Flash app Eldwin and I have created from scratch, and we cracked our brains for quite some time over the format / syntax of Flash. Concurrently, Laurence and Carolyn were busy designing the logic and graphical interface of our app, both having to learn on the go as well. Consequently, the Aspirations were put on some figurative shelf for quite some time.

Even the name for the App wasn't decided till really late. In a world where all you see of a product before you use it is its name and a short description, these are the first attention grabbers for new users. We wanted something with a catchy ring to it, while referring to our content in some way. Our placeholder name, Codename Gentoo, is our internal reference to it, on account of Gentoo being a family of penguins ^^. An interesting name I found while page hopping was Booooooom, which I initially thought was weird since it was hard to remember its exact length, till I saw its logo.



Okay, that's quite cool~ ^^ It'd be quite hard for someone with their logo to forget them. It even reminds users of the services they provide, as the company is actually a design company.

Names and logos are, especially in Facebook, what many users will see first. They need to be related to your app for their first impressions to be accurate. They need to be catchy enough for them to want to know more. And above all, they need to be simple enough to be remembered.

I wonder what our app will be called in a few weeks time~