In late 2007, when talks first began about creating this magazine, editor in chief Gary Steinman and I took some time to sit and brainstorm a few ideas. We started with three basic goals:

1. Simple


2. Unique


3. Memorable

These are essential for any brand, but were particularly essential for us, considering our new magazine would be following a highly-visible and well-recognized name in the anime/manga industry. These three factors would have to be the things that set our new project apart from the past and still set a benchmark for our future.

Simple

The most obvious way to simply a brand name is to make it short. We thought about some of the current trend of building a brand directly out of a three letter acronym, like what's happened with some of prominent gaming magazines, like EGM, OPM and OXM. The idea of even going with the abbreviated-word-as-acronym also came to mind, like the late GMR magazine.

We tossed around ideas, but nothing really stuck out. Part of the problem with going the faux-acronym route is that it seems only logical that the acronym might actually stand for something. One possible idea was "NRD" as in "short for NERD" but figuring out a simple and logical explanation for N-R-D didn't show much promise.

After much discussion, we came around to looking at short, one-syllable words. If done right, it could still be simple and effective. At some point, we landed on the word "peek." I'm not sure where exactly it came from, but I think it was based on the idea that this new magazine would revolve heavily around providing new and interesting coverage on oft-overlooked topics and forms of entertainment. The notion of "exclusive" and "inside" peeks at these things was definitely what the magazine would be shooting for, but when we discovered that there was already a PEEK magazine (apparently a collector's item from the '30s), we took a step back and wondered if it'd be wise to possibly usurp that namesake.

Rolling the word "peek" around for a bit, I somehow made the homophonous leap to "pique." I've always heard the word used in the phrase "pique your interest" and while that seemed to fit for our purposes, I still wasn't positive on it. Not quite yet.

Unique

One thing was for sure, "Pique" was definitely in the realm of unique in terms of a brand name for a magazine. Neither of us could think of a single company or entity that operated under that name, and while it might initially cause some double takes, it would definitely stick out in a crowd.

Something about the name said "sophistication" and "exotic" but it also felt a little too "fancy." I was worried that the meaning of the name and the goal of the magazine would get lost in the name itself. Having a unique name is only good if it holds true to what your ideas are. Otherwise, you risk misrepresenting your intentions to customers and causing confusion.

Memorable

First and foremost, I wasn't sure if "Pique" was all that visually appealing. Here was a case where hearing the word and seeing the word presented two very different experiences. It was a short, cute-sounding word, but on paper, the more I saw it, the more it reeked of pretense.

So I wondered if lobbing off the "ue" at the end would help make it any better.

Piq

My immediate reaction was like anyone else's.

Piq = Pig

We agreed on that for the moment and I went back to do some sketching and workup some rough thumbnails of what a logo would look like, and if we could make it not look like "pig" in some way or another.

It was here where I realized that this abbreviated word also seemed to fit with our earlier thinking about a short three letter faux-acronym, except that there was still no acceptable acronym that we could form out of it. But, that did give me the idea to try "PIQ" as part of my designs.

PIQ

Here was something that finally stood out to us. Simple. Unique. Memorable? Perhaps so. A large part of that was up to how effective the logo and imprint would be. Either way, we'd finally come to a decision and started moving forward to the next phase.