Last week Matthew Smith at Pattern Tap emailed us about naming of Pattern App and posted this tweet:
This is atrocious! Pattern App? C’mon guys, that’s a little too close to home :http://patternapp.com/
After that tweet went out, also a few other people commented about it. Unluckily I (Janne) and Johannes started our vacations last week and thus we didn’t comment on this earlier. Here are our thoughts about the naming.
Naming of Pattern App
Pattern App was called UI Pattern Factory until two weeks back when we relaunched our user interface design pattern library. There were several reasons why we decided to rename it. First, we were now building a tool for sharing, creating and managing design patterns, and we thought that “UI Pattern Factory” is a bad name for it. Second, “Pattern Factory” is our company name, and we want to use uipatternfactory.com domain for it in the future. Third, we wanted to stop using “UI” in the name, because we are planning to include patterns that don’t fit in the “UI” category.
So, we started brainstorming a new name and came up with a long list of names. That list contained also “Pattern App”, which was a working title for our new design pattern application. As it often goes, the working title started to sound good and we decided to stick with it. It is short, relevant, memorable, and Google didn’t find anything similar. We are also familiar with other design pattern resources and Pattern App wasn’t too similar to them. In addition, few months ago we also blogged about the new name to get feedback about it, and no one mentioned anything about Pattern Tap (The old blog doesn’t exist anymore, but it is cached in Google).
We knew of the existence of Pattern Tap but it didn’t come to our minds during the naming process. This was because Pattern Tap is not about design patterns, although the name suggests so. Pattern Tap is a Web design gallery. It contains screenshots that users can browse, comment on, and organize. We don’t follow design galleries that actively.
History of Pattern App
When Matthew tweeted about Pattern App, some people replied to him that also the idea is taken from Pattern Tap. Well, first of all, UI Pattern Factory, predecessor to Pattern App, was created months before Pattern Tap was born. Currently Pattern App has almost nothing new compared to UI Pattern Factory except new patterns, so this isn’t true. Before UI Pattern Factory I had already created one design pattern library for internal use and wrote my Master’s thesis about the process in 2006-2007. The idea of Pattern App was born at that time and everyone can read that from my thesis.
Someone even mentioned that the design looks similar to Pattern Tap, but everyone can judge this by himself. We think that the site doesn’t look more similar to Pattern Tap than almost any design pattern or web design gallery site around there. In that sense also the old UI Pattern Factory-website looked a lot like the current Pattern Tap.
What do you think?
Our aim was by no means to be disrespectful to Pattern Tap. Now we would now like to hear what you think about the name - should we consider renaming Pattern App again?
Confused,
Janne Lammi
