Naming 110 Characters

We’ve named 110 characters and the process has stayed the same the whole way: describe what you can see, in the order you see it, and stop before it becomes a sentence.

The order

Colour first, then the thing that defines the character, then the role if there is one. Amethyst Cloud Mane Panda is purple, has a mane made of cloud shapes, and is a panda. Hazelnut Baker Panda is hazelnut coloured and is a baker. That’s the whole system, and it’s deliberately unglamorous.

The reason for colour first is practical. People search by colour more than by anything else, and a name that begins with the colour is a name that can be found. The reason for putting the visual feature second is that it’s the part that distinguishes a character from the other nine in its theme.

What we avoid

Numbers in names. Nothing kills a character faster than being called version 2. Pun names, mostly, because they age badly and they don’t survive translation. And anything that tries to tell a story the sculpt doesn’t, since a name promising a backstory that isn’t visible in the object just makes the object look thin.

Where we broke our own rules

Monochrome Panda breaks the colour rule and we kept it anyway, because calling it Black and White Panda was worse. A few of the fantasy characters have names longer than they should be, and those are the ones we’d shorten if we were starting over. Long names don’t fit on a product page and they get truncated in search results, which is a real cost.

There are also a couple of names that came from the studio rather than the object. Someone said something while a piece was being demoulded, it stuck, and by the time anyone questioned it the name was on the site. We’re not going to say which ones.

Why it’s all pandas

Because a fixed species turns the collection into a constraint problem, and constraints are where the interesting design happens. Once the body is fixed, the only places left to work are colour, prop, pose and expression, and 110 characters in, we haven’t run out of combinations. That’s the argument for the system, and the naming is just the visible part of it.

Some names write themselves. Circus Clown Panda was named in about four seconds, and it’s still the one we get asked about most.