What’s in a name?
When auditioning names for my little experiment, I had several considerations in mind:
Since my clients would be hiring “me”, it had to reflect my personality.
It had to showcase my talent and skills.
And it had to be memorable, maybe bring a smile to my future clients’ faces.
I love dogs. I try not to take myself too seriously. Doodling with a #2 Faber on a Strathmore sketchpad is a form of relaxation for me. And one of my favorite sayings as kid was “hot diggity dog!” And thus, my official name became Hot Digital Dog! It checked all the boxes - it was a bit quirky, it spoke to the market I hoped to serve and I had fun putting it together. I’d used this style of cartooning/illustration in my freelance jobs during college (to some degree of success), so it was sorta like going back to my roots. My logo was inspired by our silly rescue dog at the time: a lab/husky mix named Jersey from the Liverpool, NY, SPCA.
It worked well for my ad agency and production company clients. Thing is, I started getting more corporate clients, especially in the medical field. And some of those clients were Fortune 500 companies. A cartoon dog didn’t exactly speak (no pun intended) “professionalism”, “stability” or “longevity.” I remember the day when this one medical client finally said to me, “Ya know, you might want to think about a more professional name.” And with his help as a sounding board, a revised version of my company name and logo began.
At the time, I was doing a lot of interactive work (CDs, DVDs and websites) for a variety of medical clients in addition to my stable of traditional agency and direct clients. Also at the time, anything related to digital was “i-This” and “i-That”. Looking at my evolved checkboxes of services - interactive, medical, media and design - and the HDD reboot was born: iMed Design. It was perfect! It spoke to all those services and it easily rolled off the tongue - not an inconsequential consideration when answering the phone. Plus the web domain was available.
20 years into this and I learned a few things. “iMed” is not all that unique - a Google search returns over 16,000,000 results. Some of my larger corporate clients’ IT departments block any combination of the word “med” because they think I sell bulk prescriptions over the internet. “iMed” is a popular birth-name for terrorists (sorta like “Bob” or “Dave,” I guess). And probably my favorite unintentional consequence: for a month, one of my new contacts in Nevada (where we had moved to in 2004) inexplicably kept calling me Ed. I finally told her one day, “I answer to Andrew, Andy and ‘drew, and even And, but rarely Ed. Where did you get that?!” She replied, “From your license plate. I’m Ed.”
Maybe I should’ve been a good boy and stuck with the Dog.
Because IMNOTREALLYED wouldn’t fit.