We want YOU to help us decide the future of the Brainstormer!
Naming your children is a wonderful opportunity for self-exploration and creative expression. It’s also essential in defining your child’s sense of identity (Etilia Aden, Baby Name Stats).
Our vision
Baby Name Brainstorm is here to help stimulate your own creativity and provide interesting name suggestions without resort to eye-glazing, alphabetical lists.
Our advantage is three fold:
- speed (explore the name space without waiting for page reloads)
- engagement (our unique, animated graph makes name-storming all the more fun)
- visualisation (stimulates the right brain, unleashing your natural creativity)
Our early efforts have focused on word phonetics; but this is just the beginning. We’re building a powerful name-association engine to be not only fun, but insightful. You can help by telling us which of these you think you could get the most value out of.
Community Feature Building: Round 1
Please vote for which feature you would most like to see introduced into the brainstormer first.
- Favourites: bookmark your favourite names in the graph so you can list them and return to them quickly.
- Namesakes: see which notable people from history, literature and pop-culture have a particular name; follow associations among them.
- Themes: create your own designer name themes and share them with the world.
- Meanings: see the meaning and origin of names in the graph; find names which share similar meanings.
[polldaddy poll="1122702"]
6 Responses to “We want YOU to help us make the Baby Name Brainstormer Better”
Very cool to see this!
Favorites are always a favorite for me. Playing around with variations ad other, similar names would really expand my lists further. Expansion means more choices and choices are always a grand thing to have! I’l be back to check out any changes!
I am intrigued by the “themes” option.
My first thought was that themes might be pre-set groupings based on common characteristics (e.g. old-fashioned, modern, Western, breezy, popular, unusual). Themes in this sense I think could be really cool–people could stick with a certain style of name as they click through name to name.
But I’m not sure what you mean about creating “designer” themes. (Could you explain a bit more?)
So, instead of voting for themes, I went for meanings. I know it’s a really standard thing for baby name websites, but your unique interface would make finding meanings (and especially finding names with the same meanings) a lot of fun.
Hi Nancy — you’re concept of themes is pretty close to what I have in mind. By ‘designer themes’ I mean that rather than the themes being pre-set, anyone can create their own custom designed group of names based on a particular genre or concept and then share them. Rather than being all encompassing categories like ‘old-fashioned’ or ‘popular’, they would be much smaller, more focused groups with a creative concept behind them. Each theme would be owned by it author, so they could be very personally expressive.
Themes might have titles like ‘Spaghetti Western’, ‘Renaissance Man’ or ‘Southern Belle’. It’s up to the individual creativity of users.
When we introduce namesakes, we will also have ‘lists’ which will be similar to themes except that rather than being individual contributions, they will be collaborative and more authoritative, for example ‘US Presidents’ or ‘Characters from Hamlet’.
Hi Lachlan,
First off, this is a great interface and being a big graph viz fan, I’m happy to see it being applied for something so practical and useful as exploring potential baby names. I think you’ve done a great job finding ways in which names are related (i.e., found in, sounds like).
I’ve posted some thoughts for improving the technical aspects of the interface on my blog, if you’re interested.
As for which of the above features I’d like to see the most, it would have to be the meanings of the names. Looking forward to seeing the future development!
Hey Daniel. Thanks very much for the review and for the constructive feedback. I’ve posted my response to your blog (I’m sure you knew that already
That is a very interesting concept. If only I had heard of it when I had my first child!