Titlelessness

[johnastovall]

Brooks Jensen's podcast on the importance of titles for projects.

"A title for your project is necessary and important. If you can't think of one, maybe that in itself is telling you something about your creative process."

[brad]

I love Brooks.

[Steelsun]

I had a boss that felt that every consulting project we had needed a title.

Could it be as simple as "Barnes Family ID Theft Education"? Nope, had to be something weird like "Project Amniocentesis" or "Project Liberty", which had no logical naming relationship.
Try remembering 6 months later what the heck "Project Equatorial" involved....

I usually give my Projects names that have meaning, if the project is "Big", such as my "360 Houston" project I am starting where I'll take a shot of Houston Downtown from 360 different places. If they are smaller, like some stock shots I did for a client last week, I'll name it something like "Clientname - Office Stock" or whatever.

My "other" job has alot of small cases/projects (i.e. under 2 hours work, or under $500 in billing" and those are usually given a project number (YY-MM-SSS, where YY is the year, MM is the month, and SSS is a sequential number, so first project in October 2008 is 08-10-001, next is 08-10-002, etc) All "bigger" projects are also issued a number - helps on record keeping and storage and retrieval of files.

[brad]

Yea.. but I think Brooks is talking more about an individual image meant for art.. for it to have its own title, just like the great artworks of past have had.

Its an interesting point.. titling is important in a lot of contests, too.

[AndrewCCM]

Originally Posted by Steelsun

I had a boss that felt that every consulting project we had needed a title.

Could it be as simple as "Barnes Family ID Theft Education"? Nope, had to be something weird like "Project Amniocentesis" or "Project Liberty", which had no logical naming relationship.
Try remembering 6 months later what the heck "Project Equatorial" involved....

That is my world these days. Project Atlas, Code Red, Project Alamo.. blahblah blah

[toverman]

I agree with him. Unless it's a project about nameless things, which I'd call "Untitled" just to be a smarty. Or an art installment whereupon the artist wants the viewers to not have preconceived notions about what they are viewing, just letting the images themselves do the talking.

Those are just reaching. A regular project probably isn't complete until it has a name and focal point. Guess I'll have to refine my "Tarrant County Chicken Restaurants" project until it has a better name. Actually, I have an idea for it, a real pullet-surprise winner.