It was a surprising struggle to pick out the name for this company.
Well. It wasn't really a struggle until I was up against a deadline to file my LLC paperwork and officially get everything off the ground. Then I balked at the name I'd picked out months and months ago. Before I moved back to Michigan from Tucson. Back when starting a production company was just an inkling, a tickle in the imagination, I had a name picked out. And then, facing down the barrel of forms and bureaucracy, I balked.
Why? It's probably because I started saying the name aloud, to people, instead of just doodling it in the margins of the meeting minutes at my office job. It was already weird enough to say aloud, "I want to start a production company." And then to name it too. Didn't feel right.
So it was back to the drawing board. Lists were made. I re-read some of my old writing. Flipped through a dictionary. Let words carom off me and jostle in my brain just like back when I was writing poetry that looked like I fished it out of John Milton's wastepaper basket. Used Google translate to see what things looked like in Galician, Greek, Gurajati.
I even took a stab at some online thesauri which were, not to put too fine a point on it, garbage.
My brother suggested writing mission/vision statements to see if the name would spring from that. Sort of like using the theme of your screenplay to determine how your scenes unfold. Makes sense. Great idea. Just didn't produce a name for me.
In the end, when I was about to throw in the towel and just go with VIDEO VIDEO VIDEO LLC, I bumped into the word "colossus" in a not-great book I was reading. Can't remember the book now.
Love the word. Powerful. Awe-some. Solid. Love the way it sounds. Love the shape of it.
Just didn't love the monolithic connotation. It didn't fit.
But I'd just finished a book called A YEAR OF LIVING DANISHLY, in which the author's husband accepts a job with Lego in Denmark. And the official name of the little Lego guys--"minifigure"--always stuck in my head. So I figured we'd be a mini colossus.
Small and mighty. Nimble and tough. Unexpected. Mini Colossus.
And here's our very basic first logo. Because when you're putting together a business at light speed, hitting on something clean, readable, and adaptable out of the gates is pretty valuable.