Our Name
/limn/
Verb literary
i) Depict or describe in painting or words. To delineate.
ii) Illuminate, suffuse or highlight (something) with light or bright color.
What began as a hunch formed a hypothesis to become his Delaware C Corp. Conceived from experience and out of frustration. Born by challenge and opportunity, above all.
In practical terms, the experience was developing and operating workplaces, and the frustration was an intractable lack of customization in furniture, and an abundance of faux materials and curious laminates, bags of hardware for knockdown assemblages, and suggestions from project managers that we’d be wise to buy extended warranty coverage “for parts.”
What I wanted was real timber and solid steel, crafted together with thought and tradition, not by mass market bottom line incentives. With an idea, there is often a name before there is a business. We are no different, and so we were Timbersteel. To us this name was straight to the point and required little imagination to understand what you were getting: solid material.
After a name, one’s got to have a logo so we engaged Thomas Lehman and Analog Labs in Milan to help us create the brand. Below are concepts from the early days.
At one point during our concept review call, Thomas pressed the pause button and said, “No offense guys, but can I be honest here?” You sound like a couple of dudes wearing Carhartt in Red Hook, Brooklyn. And nothing against those lads or that place, but you are from California. And let’s just be clear here at the outset of our work together, we don’t do live edge.”
Dreamers sometimes have a hard time seeing past their visions, but when we did some basic internet research, we found Timber Steel, and it’s many permutations, to be used and claimed and used again, over and over. And the more we thought about it, the more we realized that the very thing we liked at first, it’s concision and directness, was the very thing that would limit it as our brand, as it left little room for imagination in the mind of the beholder. Because to be completely known is to contained by the past, and cut off from the future.
Still, our emotional attachment was so great that kept it as our corporate entity name – Timbersteel, Inc. – and set out in search of a new name free of limitations and preconceived notions. We wanted something that was inherently creative, dynamic enough, and that could become more than our ambition and effort alone, combined together.
For anyone who’s compiled a list of potential baby names, you understand how it can set the creative and emotional juices loose. On the back of Denis Johnson’s masterpiece “Already Dead. A California Gothic.”, there is a sentence of praise from the New York Observer, “Johnson writes with his hands on fire and his head caked in ice.”
I’ve always loved that line and fancy that state, but more importantly are 3 things before sharing the list. i) you should read that book; ii) I am no Denis Johnson; iii) it was when working the Super Thesaurus for fresh entrants that I typed the word delineate and saw a curious word new to me, limn.
Visually it’s form appealed, masculine and feminine, both new school and somehow 1940’s classic. Definitionally it was pretty spot on. On the internet it wasn’t stepped on and was available for trademark since the original trademark holder let it lapse.
Which brings us to the important point in this story. There was a store in San Francisco that purveyed modern and avant garde furniture, along with other fine items, and is well-known probably by many folks reading this. In 2001, SFGate called it “an emporium of modern design” which it was and seemingly more. I never went there (SAD) and only vaguely remembered the storefront when prompted by our designer after we surfaced the potential new name.
“Did you come up with that on your own?” asked Thomas
“Yes, with help. Super Thesaurus. Delineate”
“There was a pretty legendary store, do you remember it?”
“Now that you mention it, I do. Like, barely.”
“I know a guy that knows that guy, the former owner. Maybe he’ll sell you the domain.”
He wouldn’t sell us the domain so we added the “us” in limn.us.com and fancied it for the act of co creation which is more or less the entire enterprise. I share all this because it’s the simple truth which, along with originality, is what we strive for here, both of which tend to be illusions, about which we forget that’s what they are.
Sorry Foxyjoints, we found ourselves a new name, our DBA, a trademark, and heard the call to get back to drawing board.
Logo study #2.
Saving the best for last - an age old technique..
Like any design, or song, or poem or work of art that resonates, you know it when you experience it, feeling it inside somewhere between and below the ears, above the waist.
And with a glowing heart, I thank you for reading our first blog and hopefully giving us a bit of the ‘ol gander. Our team, partners, investors, family and friends thank you too, with a depth of gratitude that guides us.
For our word is our name.
Etymology
From Middle English limnen, limyne, lymm, lymn, lymne (“to illuminate (a manuscript)”),[1] a variant of luminen (“to illuminate (a manuscript)”),[2] short form of enluminen (“to shed light on, illuminate; to enlighten; to make bright or clear; to give colour to; to illuminate (a manuscript); to depict, describe; to adorn or embellish with figures of speech or poetry; to make famous, glorious, or illustrious”), from Old French enluminer (“to brighten, light up; to give colour to; to illuminate (a manuscript)”),[3] from Latin illūminō (“to brighten, light up; to adorn; to make conspicuous”), from il- (a variant of in- (prefix meaning ‘in, inside’)) + lūminō (“to brighten, illuminate; to reveal”) (from lūmen (“light; (poetic) brightness”) (from Proto-Indo-European *lewk- (“bright; to shine; to see”)) + -ō (suffix forming regular first-conjugation verbs)).[4]