The day you have to name the file with your notes or the folder where you keep those notes, that day, you know you need a name.

The day you have to name the file with your notes or the folder where you keep those notes, that day, you know you need a name. Maybe at that moment you don't have the story, or the puzzles, just a sketch of the idea. But the universe is pushing you to find a name. Under these conditions, what usually happens is that, you don’t like anything.

Forced by the speed of the project and the rush, unmemory was baptized several times. Pulse, it's the first one he had. It was Pere Esteve who brought it, one of the first people with whom we shared the idea and the person in charge of our first prototype. As I was refusing to give it a name, he named it Pulse and we left it like that for a while. He never explained (or we never understood) the reasons to give unmemory that name, by the way.

We were then in a hurry because we needed a website and an URL, so we started to look for alternatives. And when you are lost and desperate you turn to the Internet realm looking for help. This is a list of random names made with an online name generator tool.

PERVENCHE / SINOPER / WATCHET / MALACHITE

No one of these options really convinced us, so we moved on.

The story was not over but we thought that if the name was cool enough, it wouldn’t bother us too much if it was linked to it or not. So we made a list with names that we liked: songs, movies, more random things ... Some of them convinced us enough to buy the Internet domain (isladeencanta.com)

But sometimes it happens that when you take distance or let some time pass, what seemed good to you no longer seems so good. So we went back to square one. More oriented this time, we made a list of criteria that the name should meet (and meanwhile, we changed the name of Pulse to R3M3MB3R)

It had to be unpublished, it had to evoke the story, it had to be short (one or two words maximum) and it had to be easy to remember and easy to pronounce in several languages (especially English and Spanish) There didn't have to be anything similar in the app stores and it should have little results in Google and Facebook. And last but not least we had to like it. Easy peasy.

But we came to a list of three:

Memoir / Memoire

We liked both terms (in English and French). They explained the story in just one word. But to our liking they were too similar to "memento" that although it is a reference work, we wanted to keep a distance. That wasn’t the only drawback: there were several applications in the App Store with that name, on Facebook "Memoir" is associated with pages of deceased people and the largest group "We Love Memoirs" is dedicated to biographies ... These difficulties led us to to think that if we wanted to save "Memoir" we should add an adjective.

Memo149

Adding a number to a noun sounded like a good option. The number allows you to be unique very easily. Thus, we explored alternatives such as 597 Memories, 67 Fragments or Fact 57 (for us, as you may have noticed, it was important that the figure was a prime number. Why? Just because) So we are left with Memo 149 that more or less fulfilled all the objectives.

unmemory

And when we were about to decide definitively that our project was going to be called Memo 149, unmemory appeared. Almost by chance, during a meal with precisely Pere Esteve. We were looking for a way to call people who have a lot of memory and we couldn't find any words. So we thought about the ones that can't remember and it came out "forgetful" (“desmemoriado” in Spanish) and then when we tried to translate it into English, "unmemory" came out. We liked it right away. We immediately went on the internet to search if it existed and we found an unofficial but used definition: unmemories are all those moments that you don't remember from a night when you drank a lot. We Googled and there were very few results. On Facebook none. Neither on the App Store. However, the Internet domain was taken: a Japanese hotel had it. We didn't mind, we all thought unmemory was a good name.

Anyway, to make the final decision, we prepared two logos and did a little market research. We asked close friends which of the two they liked best. And I honestly don't remember which one was the winner. I think that Beto and I had decided without knowing it.