Naming is hard. As designers and developers, we often struggle finding the right name — for a design token, colors, UI components, HTML classes, and variables. Sometimes, the names we choose are too generic, so it’s difficult to understand what exactly is meant. And sometimes they are too specific, leaving little room for flexibility and re-use.

In this post, we want to get to the bottom of this and explore how we can make naming more straightforward. How do we choose the right names? And which naming conventions work best? Let’s take a closer look.

Inspiration For Naming

If you’re looking for some inspiration for naming HTML classes, CSS properties, or JavaScript functions, Classnames is a wonderful resource jam-packed with ideas that get you thinking outside the box.

The site provides thematically grouped lists of words perfect for naming. You’ll find terms to describe different kinds of behavior, likeness between things, order, grouping, and association, but also themed collections of words that wouldn’t instantly come to one’s mind when it comes to code, among them words from nature, art, theater, music, architecture, fashion, and publishing.

Naming Conventions

What makes a good name? Javier Cuello summarized a set of naming best practices that help you name your layers, groups and components in a consistent and scalable way.

As Javier points out, a good name has a logical structure, is short, meaningful, and known by everyone, and not related to visual properties. He shares do’s and don’ts to illustrate how to achieve that and also takes a closer look at all the fine little details you need to consider when naming sizes, colors, groups, layers, and components.