This is easily the most frequently asked question we get asked about our company, so I thought I’d take a minute and share the story of our name.
What in the world is a hivemind?
What’s the name “Hivemind” all about? Why don’t you use a bee in your logo? Shouldn’t your colors be black and yellow? I’m so glad you asked. Let’s start at the beginning.
The beginning
In an earlier incarnation of our company, there was a time when Jonathan and myself were struggling to decide on the perfect company name. I’d love to tell you branding is always easy for us, but the truth is that doing work for yourself is one of the hardest jobs a creative can be given!
During a late night brainstorming session, the term “hivemind” came up in our conversation. The term has been used as a reference to the internet as a group of people, but being the curious fellows that we are, we decided to see what the origin of the idea was.
As it turns out, the term was originally coined as a reference to the apparent collective conciousness of colonies of social insects, such as bees. Without any audible communication, these insects work like a well-oiled machine, as if they were sharing a brain. You might even assume they were passing along ideas and information to each other by watching how well they worked as one unit, but you’d be wrong.
We immediately saw the correlation between this name and our business. From day one, one of our primary motivations for starting the company was the fact that Jonathan and I seemed to share a brain. Finishing each other’s sentences (in a completely normal, masculine way), asking the same questions, and being interested in similar projects. We also saw immense value in the different life and career experiences each of us brought to our company, and how those helped us to work together to find the perfect solution to just about any problem we were presented.
But that’s not the end of the story. For that, you need to fast forward to today.
Today
As our company was going through a metamorphoses (that’s a fancy word for change) and relaunching with Lance at the helm (that’s like the steering wheel of a boat), we figured we needed to go down the company naming road all over again.
We started to talk through our new concept; the idea that we could collaborate with a network of creatives around the country to bring clients the highest quality marketing work possible, at affordable rates, with reasonable timelines. The more we talked, the more we realized that instead of moving further away from the Hivemind name, we were actually moving closer to it.
The combination of our founders’ combined experience mixed with our creatives’ vast knowledge and skill set was all just a giant beacon pointing toward our new name. The rest, as they say, is history. We’re Hivemind Creative. Nice to meet you.
Yeah, but what about the bees?
Well, Jonathan is deathly afraid of bees. Also, during testing of our original web site and logo designs, some of our focus group participants actually had an alergic reation to a black and yellow version of the Hivemind logo. As you can imagine, it was just better for us to stay away from that all together.