02 April 2021

Rejected blog names

For a while, I thought about whether I should give the Better Posters book a different title. Ultimately, I decided it made sense to keep the phrase “better posters” as the title. Enough people have visited this blog that I thought it made sense to keep the little itty-bitty brand. 

But if things were a little different twelve years ago, I might have a different title for the book.

Poster Bliss
This blog almost got called Poster Bliss instead of Better Posters.

One of the big inspirations for this blog was Garr Reynold’s Presentation Zen blog. I liked the idea of trying to do for posters what Garr was doing for presentations. And that led me to think about naming the blog similarly to Garr’s: [Presentation form] [Word indicating calm and enlightenment].

I kind of liked the title (still do!), but I decided against it. From imperfect memory, I thought it was maybe a little too presumptuous and ambitious. Plus, it was a little too similar to Garr’s blog.

That Mike Morrison converged on the phrase when he created the #BetterPoster hashtag on Twitter was kind of proof positive that the phrase was a good one – even if people sometimes muddled his efforts and mine!

I think “better” ended up encapsulating the spirit of this project. I’ve said from time to time that this blog isn’t Perfect Posters or Excellent Posters, it’s Better Posters. I never try to destroy someone’s style, but I try to find ways to improve what is already there. It’s just about trying to make posters a little better than they are now. Constant improvement is the samurai way.

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