Dinamo Name Crawler

Everyone knows that a name is the most important part of a typeface. But finding a good name is difficult. Just like with web URLs, most good names are taken quickly. You don’t want to run around with a great font that has a poor name. It makes you both look like fools.

The Dinamo Name Crawler is here to help: It generates names based on your choice of characters. You can crawl the names you like for further information, derivatives, and language translations. Maybe a translation proves to be the better name, or the beginning of a new name crawl?

After connecting remotely during the first lock down, we enlisted New York-based Taichi Aritomo to help us develop Name Crawler. “To keep things economical, we combined open-source datasets for the words and definitions, another dataset for synonyms, and yet another for the translations,” says Taichi. “All this data was published by different people, in different formats, so it was a bit challenging to wrangle it all together.”

Our list currently includes around 250k potential font names; an update in the pipeline may see the addition of encyclopedic databases of plant species to our Name Crawler list. “One other particular challenge was that after some initial testing, we realized we needed a ‘bad words’ filter in our dictionary, to skip the undesirable words that are offensive or triggering,” adds our font developer Rob Janes.

During testing, we also noticed that long words or very short words are often returned during the crawling process, and so we decided to limit the displayed names to between between 3 and 8 characters, which we feel is an optimal length for a font name. We find that combining a shorter word length with a font's best letters is a solid recipe for naming a font. You might also want to think about how the name of your typeface should feel.

For example: we’re quite happy how the name of “Favorit“ turned out. The name is short, features the most characteristic letters, and over all has a positive connotation.