Naming a studio: how DenWorks got its name
Workshops, dens, and the meeting point of exploration and engineering.
We spent far longer naming the studio than we would happily admit. A studio name is the one piece of copy you can never quietly fix in a later release. The homepage can be rewritten on a wet Sunday afternoon. The name goes on the App Store listing, the invoices, the email signature, and the company records, and it stays there.
So we made a list, as everyone does, and most of it was bad in the ordinary ways. Some names were already a company, a podcast, or an energy drink. A few were perfectly fine and perfectly forgettable, the kind of word you have to spell out twice on the phone. One we liked for a whole evening turned out to be a make of lawnmower. We wanted something that meant something to us and could still earn its place above a hexagon badge.
Two ideas kept circling back.
The first was the den. A den is a small room where you make things and think without an audience. A shed at the bottom of the garden, a corner of a bedroom with a soldering iron and too many cables, the place a lot of us first fell for computers. It is private, a little untidy, and entirely yours. That matched how we actually work. We are two people who like shutting the door and building.
The second was works. It is a plain, slightly industrial word, the sort you still see on the side of old buildings. Ironworks, gasworks, the works. It carries the idea of a place where real things get made, with tolerances and standards and someone who cares whether the thing holds. After two decades of building large systems, that is the half of us we did not want to lose. Play without rigour is a hobby. We wanted the workshop as well as the den.
Put together, DenWorks held both halves in one word: the private, curious room and the place where things are properly made. Exploration and engineering, which is the tension the whole studio is built on. The line that sits under the logo, explore, create, innovate, is the same idea said out loud.
There were practical checks too, and they killed several favourites. Could we get the domain without paying a squatter a small fortune for it. Was the name free on the App Store. Did it survive being said aloud in a noisy room and written down by someone who had only heard it once. Did it look right set in the display face, because a name that photographs badly is a name you grow to resent. DenWorks passed all of them, which after a fortnight of near misses felt close to a miracle.
We also wanted a name that would not box us in. We make puzzle games today. We might make a utility, a toy, or something we cannot picture yet. A name that leans too hard on games, or on one clever pun, becomes a cage the first time you want to build something else. DenWorks says almost nothing about the category and almost everything about the posture. We make things, carefully, in our own room.
People occasionally assume the name is about a person called Den. It is not, though we rather like that it could be. We like that it sounds like somewhere instead of someone. You do not visit a person to see what they are making. You visit a workshop.
Naming things is most of the job, if we are honest. Features, database columns, games, the studio itself. Get the name right and the thing tends to know what it wants to be. We are glad we spent the fortnight.