Fritinancy

A Ro by Any Other Name

I usually can come up with a theory to explain copycat names and naming trends. In the early aughts, many companies chose double-O names (Qoop, Squidoo, Doostang, ooVoo) to sound like Google. All those X + Y names (Mizzen + Main, Standard & Strange, Coral & Tusk)? They evoke Ye Olde Tymes, with the modern bonus of yielding cheap domains. Lately, we’ve seen a cluster of first-name names like Oscar and Emma, the better to blunt the cutting edge of technology.

But the explanation for one mini-trend has eluded me. Perhaps you, dear readers, can help.

Ampersandinistas

Two huge companies on opposite sides of the globe. Two ad campaigns with ginormous budgets. Two teams of copywriters burning the midnight oil, pushing themselves to be original and authentic and cutting edge.

And powerful, too. Let’s not forget powerful.

Let’s see what they came up with.

September Linkfest

Today is National Punctuation Day, a semi-whimsical holiday invented in 2004 by journalist and marketing guy Jeff Rubin. I leave it to others to wail over missing commas and misplaced apostrophes. I celebrate in my own way: by recognizing creative, quirky, and mysterious punctuation in logos, brand names, and marketing communication. (Check this space on Friday for another story about a mysteriously punctuated brand name!)

 

*

 

In July, A+E Networks relaunched its Bio. channel—yes, that’s Bio-with-a-period—as FYI,—yes, that’s FYI-with-a-comma. The channel’s programming “covers a range of stories and experiences that reflect how people actually live their lives today” and “embraces an adventurous, personalized and non-prescriptive approach to peoples’ [sic] taste, space, look, story and more.”

I have no idea what that means. I do know that it’s people’s, people.

 

“The comma is always a lighter hue and alludes to the idea that there is always something more on FYI.” – Loyalkaspar, the branding agency that designed the new logo.

Additional print work was done by Los Angeles agency And Company. Yes, that is its name.

And Company has its own punctuation story:

And Company logo.

Via Brand New, which had this to say about “FYI,”:

The name of the new channel is certainly catchy. Not only does it work on the same level as other popular cable channels like AMC, TNT, FX, TBS in that it’s an acronym but it also works as lexicon commonly used in verbal and written communication when saying “for your information” proves to time-consuming.

The name is fine. The comma is annoying.

*

I’d somehow missed the news that in late 2013 Verizon introduced a tablet device named for a punctuation mark: the Ellipsis.

 

A November 2013 upgrade announcement.

 

“Ellipsis”--“a series of dots that usually indicates the intentional omission of a word, sentence, or whole section of a text without altering its meaning”—comes from a Greek word meaning “omission.” Maybe Verizon was thinking of ellipse or eclipse. Honestly, I have no idea.

*

Speaking of ellipses, Language Log recently considered their hidden meaning. Are the three dots a marker of melancholy? Confusion? Exasperation? Advanced age? Be sure to read the comments.

*

This bath mat from InterDesign is called the iDry Mat!—their exclamation point, not mine. I have no idea why it’s there, but it took me an absurdly long time to stop seeing the “i” as a Spanish-style inverted exclamation mark.

 

 

In her National Punctuation Day roundup for Time, Katy Steinmetz notes that “Exclamation marks are becoming harder to avoid, for those who would like to avoid them.” Why? “Because people need something to fill the gaps left by informative cues we get only in face-to-face communication—the raised brows, the wide eyes, the smile.” 

Not sure what this has to do with bath mats, but hey! Whatever!

*

Some punctuation says “Get with the program(ming).”

 

sf.citi stands for San Francisco Citizens Initiative for Technology and Innovation. I asked my Twitter followers how they interpreted the logo and I got various answers: “Looks like source code.” “The parentheses signal that a variable is being declared: many possible values, only one operation.” I also learned that SF is a generic object-oriented programming language (although that may not be relevant here). Charles Hill (Dustbury) probably hit the nail on the head when he said the logo is meant to convey “We can handle it, whatever it is.”

One of sf.citi’s projects is Circle the Schools.

 

It looks like source code. But sometimes an apple is just an apple.

*

 

Ding*—yes, Ding-with-an-asterisk—is the new name of Ezetop, a service that allows owners of pre-paid mobile phones to add credit (in UK parlance, “to top up”). (Ezetop remains the name of the Irish parent company.)

Not to be confused with Bing, of course.

 

Brand New once again found the name “quite catchy”: “It sounds like you just won a prize—ding!” But a few commenters pointed out that the asterisk should have six points “like the star key on a phone.”

As for me, I find it irksome that “top up” is hyphenated so randomly on the website. The verb should be hyphenless (but isn’t, except when it is).

*

Is it co-worker or coworker? June Casagrande of Grammar Underground lays down the (short) line:

Perhaps it’s my AP Style background, but I greatly – greatly -- prefer “co-worker.” Without the hyphen, the first thing I see is “cow.” The whole word looks, at a glance, like it’s pronounced “cow irker.” I’ve worked with a lot of people over the years, and as far as I know, none of them has a history of harassing cattle.

*

Speaking of confused punctuation, Non Talbot Wels (that’s his real name) tweeted this photo of a Pepsi Next promotion:

 

 

Taste less sugar? Tasteless sugar? A period or dash at the end of the second line would have been in excellent taste.

*

 

Looking for a suitable gift for NPD 2015? For $125, Art We Heart will sell you an Ampersand Garden wall hanging, handmade in Los Angeles of air plants, wood, and moss and measuring about 11 inches square.

 

*

Previous National Punctuation Day posts: 2007, 2009, 2013.

 

 

 

Ampersandwich

The punctuation symbol for “and” has been showing up in some interesting places lately.

 

& Sons, by David Gilbert. Cover art for paperback edition (published May 2014). Amazon gives the title as And Sons.

 

James Wood begins his New Yorker review of Gilbert’s novel with this comment on the unusual title:

The stunted title of David Gilbert’s second novel, “& Sons” (Random House), does a lot of useful work. It hints at succession but also at severance; at a family tree but also at a broken commercial line. The implied absence gestures toward the great stories of intergenerational struggle: Turgenev’s “Fathers and Sons,” Gosse’s “Father and Son.” And then there is that cocky ampersand: slightly offen­sive in its abstraction, wearily dismissive, the key to the whole coda.

I love the personification in that last sentence.

*

In early April, PricewaterhouseCoopers(PwC) completed its acquisition of Booz & Company, a 100-year-old management consultancy that had been spun off of rival consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton in 2008. That earlier spinoff had mandated a name change, which is why PwC’s new division is called Strategy&. Without a space. Or a complement to the conjunction.

The website has only this to say about the new name:

As part of the PwC network, Strategy& will be a leading strategy firm in its own right and help PwC as a whole become the pre-eminent strategy-through-execution firm.

Writing for Quartz, Max Nisen dug a little deeper:

The unusual new name is less digitally friendly than may have been intended. You can’t have an ampersand as part of a web address, so former and future clients will have to go to the URL “strategyand.com” to find the website. You could previously find the company at booz.com, which now redirects to the new site.

Nisen reminded readers that:

PwC’s last attempt to rename a business unit was its then-consulting unit, which it christened “Monday” in 2002 (paywall.) That move was widely criticized at the time. IBM bought the unit shortly after, so it’s unknown what the real impact of naming it after a day of the week would have been.

PwC was formed in 1998 when Price Waterhouse (whose history goes back to the London accounting firm of Samuel Price, founded 1849) merged with Coopers & Lybrand (which had had that name since 1957, but also claimed mid-19th-century roots). The odd capitalization was instituted at the time of the merger; poor Lybrand was consigned to obscurity.

In a name review published in June, Catchword’s Beth Gerber praised Strategy&’s “gutsiness” but judged it “dry and bookish: a one-dimensional name.”

To me, “Strategy&” looks less like a corporate name and more like the themeline for an ad campaign. In ads, the sentence could be completed: Strategy& … insights. Strategy& … execution. As a name, though, Strategy& is both too cute and too literal: telling us you do strategy-plus doesn’t give us a benefit, an emotional connection, or a reason to prefer your services over your competitors’. A punctuation mark, no matter how elegantly rendered—and this one is pretty boring—simply isn’t sturdy enough to support a brand identity.

*

For an elegant and—more to the point—meaningful ampersand, consider the new logo for the South Denmark Philharmonic (Sønderjyllands Symfoniorkester in Danish).

 

 

Here’s how Danish design firm Halbye Kaag JWT explains the concept:

By using the ampersand as a visual bridge between two parties, the symphony orchestra became a brand that only truly existed together with its the community, guest conductors, soloists and audience.

The ampersand was also an visual abstraction of a G-clef known from written notes. The merging between two typefaces represents classical music in modern context.

The design element translates wittily to a variety of applications.

 

Concert posters via Brand New logo critique (which misses the G-clef allusion).

 

Note that the South Denmark Philharmonic isn’t pressing the ampersand into unnatural service as a name or title: it’s using it as a visual reference and shorthand. Bravi!

*

Read my other posts about ampersands, including the one in which I quote Ben Yagoda on the origin of what was once called “the 27th letter.”

Wishing my U.S. readers a festive & safe & relaxing Independence Day!

Ampersandstorm

In retail branding this season, ampersands are the new black. I’ve written previously about ampersand-linked retail brand names like Judith & Charles, Fifth & Pacific, and Georgi & Willow, and I’m working on a new post that compiles more than 30 additional “X & Y” names. In the meantime, here are two examples of how the ampersand is extending its reach.

Crate & Barrel, the mid-market home-furnishings chain, this week launched a $10 million ad campaign based on the ampersand. The ads—which will appear in magazines, on TV, online, and in stores—use “X & Y” headlines to celebrate connections: “Hostess & Mostess,” “Love & Light,” “Happy & Hanukkah.”

Here’s one of the print ads:

 

And here’s the “Now & Forever” spot:

 

See more Crate & Barrel ads at Creativity Online. 

To make sure you get the point, the stores are selling a pillow with “our iconic Helvetica ampersand.”

 

In another corner of retaildom, women’s-wear designer Eileen Fisher has created an “Ampersand” category to tell stories that go “behind the label” and beyond color and fabric content.

The home page:

A print ad:

Vanity Fair, September 2012

 

In case you didn’t know: The word “ampersand” first appeared in print in 1837; it’s a contraction of “and per se and.” Read my 2007 post about ampersands, in which I quote liberally from Ben Yagoda’s excellent book When You Catch an Adjective, Kill It.

Eat at X + Y

A while back, in a post about Canadian fashion brand Teenflo’s name change to Judith & Charles, I noted that the new name fit a pattern I’ve been seeing a lot lately. I called it “X + Y,” and I mentioned that I’ve noticed a parallel trend in restaurant naming. Today I want to show you some examples.

As with fashion and retail, X + Y restaurants aren’t entirely new. In the past, though, the X and Y elements have almost always been surnames: Musso & Frank (in Los Angeles) and Smith & Wollensky (in various cities) are two venerable examples. Musso & Frank was named for its founders, Joseph Musso and Frank Toulet; Smith & Wollensky was reputedly named via a random search of the Manhattan phone directory.

And X + Y is hardly the first significant fad in restaurant naming. In the late 1980s I was a contributing editor at a magazine called Tables that was distributed free of charge to the wait staff at a certain type of large restaurant—the type that had a full bar (a major liquor company was the magazine’s sole advertiser) and, often, an adjective-noun name: Ruby Tuesday, Velvet Turtle, Red Lobster.

In the early 2000s we saw a trend toward stark one-word names (mostly nouns) that seemed to say, “We can’t be bothered with fancy nomenclature—we’re much too busy creating fabulosity in the kitchen.” Many of the one-word eateries are still around: Animal, Home, Dine, Dish, Fly, Fork, Grub, Range, Sauce, Savor, Spork, and Street come to mind.

The current double-barreled trend expands on the previous theme, inserting “and,” an ampersand, or a plus sign between the nouns. The result is more expansive and inclusive than a one-word name; it feels more balanced (like an equation), and it tells a bit more of a story. On the other hand, the formula is in danger of becoming as clichéd as the old adjective-noun names.

Food-obsessed San Francisco leads the way here. My surely-not-comprehensive list includes:

Fish & Farm

Flour + Water

Bread and Cocoa

Bourbon & Branch

Baker & Banker*

Anchor & Hope, which San Francisco magazine called “a hipped-up seafood shack.” It’s not on the waterfront, however.

In New York:

Pies-n-Thighs (what this restaurant serves; note the folksy alternative to “+”)

Abe & Arthur’s (named after the founders’ grandfathers, but not connected to them otherwise)

Wall & Water (named for its Lower Manhattan address)

In Chicago:

Kith & Kin

Longman & Eagle (named for the eagle statue in Logan Square and for the statue’s creator, Evelyn Longman)

In Los Angeles:

First & Hope (named after the corner of First and Hope streets, where it’s located)

Church & State (not an address)

In Portland, Oregon:

Beaker & Flask

Any X+Y restaurant sightings in your neighborhoods?

 

___

* Baker and Banker happen to be the surnames of this restaurant’s founders, but the name is such a perfect X + Y that I couldn’t resist including it.

A Name Change at Teenflo

Last October I called Teenflo, the chic, 35-year-old Canadian fashion label, "one of the worst brand names I've seen." To quote myself: "The name suggests teenagers (who go with the flow?), but one look at the clothes tells you the label is targeted at sophisticated adult women with money to spend."

Apparently someone at Teenflo concurred, because the name is about to change to "Judith & Charles."

A recent post by Abusing the Comma (in real life the lifestyle editor at Yahoo! Canada) shared the news:

The Teenflo name came from the names of the original founders Martin and Florence when the line launched in Paris in 1975. However, deciding enough was enough (and probably tired of explaining the name's origin to the media), Teenflo's Judith Richardson and Charles Le Pierrès have launched a re-branding initiative moving from Teenflo to the eponymous Judith & Charles, gradually removing all mention of "Teenflo" from the line.

"We're transitioning in the new name," said Judy Richardson at the store opening in Bayview Village. "You will still see the Teenflo name on some items but eventually it will all be Judith & Charles."

The new name is less misleading, but I wouldn't call it distinctive. In fact, shopping malls are overrun with "X & Y" (or "X + Y" or "X and Y") labels right now. ("X & Y" is also a major trend in restaurant naming, but that's a topic for a different day.)

Here's a list—far from comprehensive, I'm sure—of fashion brands that follow the formula.

Alice + Olivia
Elizabeth and James¹
Graham & Spencer
Holmes & Yang²
Ingrid & Isabel ("The most versatile maternity accessory you'll ever need")
Lutz & Patmos³
Mac and Jac
Mars and Valentine
Martin + Osa⁴
Max and Cleo
Me & Ro
Mike & Chris
Nic + Zoe
Nick & Mo
Rag & Bone
Robbi & Nikki
Rock & Republic
Soia & Kyo
Truth & Pride
Whistle & Flute

Of course, there's a long tradition of partnership names in fashion and retail: Sears & Roebuck, Abercrombie & Fitch (founded in 1892 as a purveyor of sporting goods), Baume et Mercier. But the current trend goes beyond actual partnerships. Often, the linked names or words communicate a story, real or fictional (in the case of Martin + Osa, a historical one; in the case of Elizabeth and James, a vague narrative about "a young girl and a boy"); borrow bits of obscure slang (a "rag-and-bone man" is a junkman; "whistle and flute" is Cockney rhyming slang for "suit"); or simply juxtapose words for the hell of it. (I've never figured out "Rock & Republic.")

To be sure, it's easier to secure a double-barreled Internet domain name than a single-word name. But remember: a domain name is just an address. To succeed, a brand needs to stand apart from its competition. And in a world of "X & Y" brands, "Judith & Charles" becomes just two more names customers will struggle to remember.
__

1 The line was started in 2007 by the Olsen twins, Mary-Kate and Ashley, who named it after two of their siblings (who aren't connected to the business).

² "Holmes" is Katie Holmes, a k a Mrs. Tom Cruise.

³ The designers' surnames.

⁴ The parent company of Martin + Osa, American Eagle, recently announced that it will close all 28 retail stores and the online business by mid-year.

It Takes All Types

A roundup of reading about typefaces and type characters for your weekend amusement.

Minnesota type designer Mark Simonson addresses "the scourge of Arial":

Despite its pervasiveness, a professional designer would rarely—at least for the moment—specify Arial. To professional designers, Arial is looked down on as a not-very-faithful imitation of a typeface that is no longer fashionable [i.e., Helvetica]. It has what you might call a "low-end stigma." The few cases that I have heard of where a designer has intentionally used Arial were because the client insisted on it. Why? The client wanted to be able to produce materials in-house that matched their corporate look and they already had Arial, because it's included with Windows. True to its heritage, Arial gets chosen because it's cheap, not because it's a great typeface.

Simonson also provides a handy guide to distinguishing Arial from Helvetica. (Hat tip: Kottke.)

From Adobe's Type Topics, a consideration of the ampersand in all its variety:

Ampersand usage varies from language to language. In English and French text, the ampersand may be substituted for the words and and et, and both versions may be used in the same text. The German rule is to use the ampersand within formal or corporate titles made up of two separate names; according to present German composition rules, the ampersand may not be used in running text.

Did you know that the Poetica typeface family (created by an Adobe designer) contains 58 different ampersand characters? I didn't.

It turns out that's not all I didn't know about type. The Rather Difficult Font Game lives up to its name; I scored a humbling 22 out of 34. And to think I used to draw a paycheck as a typesetter. (Hat tip: Dynamist.)

"Down with Arial" handbill graphic from Fawny.org.

The 27th Letter

Interior Design magazine reports on a contest to create the "undiscovered" 27th letter for the English alphabet. But before you start spending your prize money (of which there apparently is none, anyway;  participants get free notebooks in which to record their ideas), read the rules:

Sponsored by the Art Directors Club and Moleskine, the competition is open exclusively to the Young Guns, a group of the visual communication club's members under the age of 30. The deadline for the contest is March 3. Finalists will be announced April 1, just as the club begins accepting entries for the sixth Young Guns class.

 

 

Participants can create the letter through any media, from type design and websites to video and photography. The results will be evaluated by a jury that will select 27 finalists to feature in a virtual exhibition on the ADC website, and in a limited edition Moleskin publication which will be available for sale to benefit Lettera 27, a non-profit literacy advocate.

I hereby make this an open-source contest. If you'd like to nominate a new letter, leave a comment. I'll forward all the submissions to the Art Directors Club.

Hat tip to reader Marjanne Pearson, who didn't want a link but who commented, "I always thought the 27th letter was the ampersand." So did I.

Pictured: Eth (also spelled edh), a letter in the Anglo-Saxon alphabet and in modern Icelandic, where it represents a voiced dental fricative like the th sound in them.

And Another Thing

I'm reading When You Catch an Adjective, Kill It: The Parts of Speech, for Better and/or Worse, the new book by language maven Ben Yagoda. (Yagoda is a frequent contributor to Slate.com; his most recent column is a very entertaining consideration of the Internet-popularized interjections "awwa," "meh," "feh," and "heh.") In a post here last week, I'd mused about "and" and the symbols that represent it, so I was tickled to see Yagoda's own witty take on the subject:

Something about and--probably its utter indispensability--has made it prone to being represented by other means than just the standard three letters. The plus sign is a favorite of instant messagers, note takers, hip-hop songwriters, conglomerates (Gulf + Western), and people demonstrating eternal love by carving their initials into trees. A little more elegant is the ampersand (&), which dates from the first century and is a ligature, or combination, of the letters e and t (and in Latin) into a single symbol. It was included in systems of typography starting in the fifteenth century, and ever since has been the character into which a type designer can inject the most artistic flair. The word "ampersand" didn't come into being until the nineteenth century. At that time & was customarily taught as the twenty-seventh letter of the alphabet and pronounced "and." When schoolchildren recited their ABCs, they concluded with the words "and, per se [i.e., by itself], 'and.'" This eventually became corrupted to "ampersand." The symbol is a favorite of law and architecture firms, and is invaluable in parsing screenplay credits. For example, the script for the 1989 ampersand-titled film Turner & Hooch is credited to "Dennis Shyrack & Michael Blodgett and Daniel Petrie Jr. and Jim Cash & Jack Epps Jr." This is not the result of haphazard typography. Rather, following Writers Guild of America guidelines, it indicates that Messrs. Shyrack and Blodgett and Messrs. Cash and Epps worked as teams, and that they and Mr. Petrie each contributed separate drafts of the screenplay. A good rule of thumb is that the more ampersands in the credits, the crummier the movie.

Image: ITC Fonts.