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Yes, tomorrow is the Day of the Ninja, that day when all nonjas can be ninjas too. Only the tigers survive, and even they have a tough time. Prepare well, your test is at hand!

Naming:


It took us a month to come up with Design Ninjas as a name, mostly because every time that we found a name that excited us, the matching domain name was taken. It was a painful and long process. Why Ninjas? We love to wrestle, and no not girly girl wrestling, real wrestling where there are bruises and sore muscles. We love to sneak up and scare each other. We go stealth sometimes and study and watch the human race to figure out why they act the way they do. These are our Ninja qualities and then there are our White and Nerdy qualities. We bring these qualities together to form the Design Part of the name where we do Web, Brand, and Process Design. Why do We Kick Ass? Because we can!


Logo:


Bill strongly recommended (in the form of saying “No Way In Hell”) me early on that I was to steer clear of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle imagery, I was a fan of them as a kid. I was also a fan of Michael Jackson’s, but we don’t want to go there. We went through a few sketches of Ninjas in masks, globes, and eyes. Then we had to dig deeper because none of these things were speaking to us. Bill then pointed me in the direction of Shurikens, or Throwing Stars. There are a bunch of kick ass throwing stars out there, so that made it easy. We sketched about 8 different styles and quickly found the one that was perfect. Then we were on to search for a font that complimented the logo and the name. We decided on the Forte font because it was readable, seemed Ninja like, and went nicely with the throwing star, in other words the font tied it all together. Now, we had our logo weapon that we could go forth and Kick Ass with. It’s always nice to have good tools, and we consider our Shuriken a great tool in the Branding Adventure.


Website, Blog, or Both:


This was a challenging problem. You see, Bill surfs in a reduced browser window, so he likes his sites liquid, plain, and functional (otherwise known as butt ugly sites). I surf full screen and I like my sites beautiful, yet still functional, maybe it’s just a girl thing. We came up with about five different designs, but could not settle on one. I found myself bored with anything we could add as text on a website. It seemed like it had all been said before. You got your welcome page, services, about, and contact..blah blah blah blah. We wanted something that was instantly engaging to people and would help start conversations, so we decided to have a blog as our landing page. We are still looking at adding more pages, but keeping this as the main landing page. We believe regular websites have their place, we even have one of those here, but for Design Ninjas, we wanted to give people a better sense of who we are and start conversations that way. Then if they are interested in who we are, we can talk about what we do.