See part 1 and part 2 of the series:
Stage 00 – The Story Behind the Entrepreneur
Now for part 3:
This was the tricky part… made a lot easier as my background is in branding, marketing and have been paid for many-a-year now to ‘have great ideas’ and work out what consumers want from a brand in order to build it and speak directly to them.
I jotted down lots of words that would resonate with what I was looking to achieve here – aiming to bring in ideas around who I am looking to target and what the site will be all about…
photography
travel
recognition
collaboration
content
global
projects
books
community
on and offline deliveries
credit
learning
a journey of discovery
membership
competitions
masterpiece
tome
opus
pictures
collection
capture
create
shoot
take
From these I had a personal naming session (still on the bus on the way home by the way, the ideas were jotted down whilst Kirsty’s phone was ringing or just after we had finished chatting). I started thinking of these words as too generic so followed the Google, Yahoo and other 2.0 business naming strategies of creating my own word through combining two key words – again the words used had to resonate with the target audience and have the ability to work when re-expanded across all brand touchpoints that users will eventually come in contact with.
One given was that it needed to contain an ‘o’ in the name, preferably in the middle, so that I could design around a lens to route photography in every user touchpoint, and in fact something that whilst helped in the long run and for deign, made it harder to brainstorm and think of options to satisfy what I was looking for…
I went through loads of ideas such as…
Tome
Opus
Photopus
Fopus
Tomeography
Collabraphy
Shoto
Licamore
Until I decided on and chose…
Phopus. The Photographic Opus.
Now I needed a hook, a handle, a hook, something emotive that calls users to action, makes them think about what they can create and sounds good as a sign off to all projects that they are set as members of the site… and weirdly I feel like I got it in one…
Phopus. Capture the Moment.
So I got to work on the design… first researching best practice in user design and interaction online – not to mention signing up to competing sites, both direct and indirect competitors to ensure I was aware of what we were up against and who I needed to be able to stand toe to toe against once Phopus gets launched.
Secondly, I opened up Photoshop to have a go at mocking up design ideas that I would then give to the developer as a guide – I’m not the greatest designer and had only used Photoshop a handful of times so these were by no means best practice in themselves but were a decent guide of what I was looking for and how I wanted the information to flow on the site.
Excitement levels ran high, all my time had been spent working on this and I could not wait to get into the main stage of development…
Greg Dillon, founder of Phopus.com, is a senior brand strategist by day who specialises in leisure, retail and sporting brands, but by night he is an entrepreneur who is setting out on his quest to be his own boss and build something that connects with people at their fundamental need for recognition for their great work.
