Naming guidelines
Why the next hundred names should not depend on who is in the room
Names are decided in many rooms: product teams, market teams, agencies, a founder on a Friday. Without written rules, each room invents its own logic, and three years later the portfolio speaks six dialects.
Naming guidelines are the fix that scales. One document that states how names are built here, so the hundredth name is as considered as the first without reconvening the people who chose it.
Rules that decide, not describe
Useful guidelines are written as decisions: what a name of each tier must contain, may contain and never contains, with the reasoning attached so the rule survives its authors.
They are also honest about taste. Register is described with real examples of yes and no from your own portfolio, because adjectives alone let every reader hear what they want.
What the document settles
The guidelines put the recurring arguments to bed in writing:
- Tiers: which levels of name exist, from house to variant, and what each is for.
- Construction: the grammar of a name at every tier, with worked examples.
- Register: the tone names may use, shown through kept and rejected candidates.
- Process: who proposes, who screens, who decides, and how long each step takes.
- Screening: the legal, language and digital checks per tier, and when they run.
- Lifecycle: renaming, retiring and reusing names as the portfolio moves.
And they end with the test sheet: the short checklist a candidate must pass, so review meetings argue about the work rather than the rules.
Written for the busiest reader
Guidelines are read under deadline by people who did not attend the workshop. Everything is findable in a minute: rules first, rationale second, examples throughout.
And they live where work happens: versioned with the brand guidelines, referenced from the templates, short enough that reading them is faster than guessing.
How DUTCH DESIGN AGENCY writes naming guidelines
We audit the names you already own: what exists, what patterns are half-alive, and which past decisions the company actually stands behind. The rules formalise the best of what is already true.
We draft the tiers, the construction grammar and the register with your team in a working session, testing the rules against next quarter's real launches before the ink dries.
And we deliver the document plus its training: a walkthrough for the teams who will use it, and the test sheet as a standalone page ready for the next review.
Why work with DUTCH DESIGN AGENCY?
We write naming guidelines as working infrastructure, judged the same way we judge a design system: by whether the next launch used it without calling us.
Let's write the rules the next name needs.
Book a discovery call.
