Departika, a graphic and web design studio

The Industry

-ika this, -ica that. Where did this trend come from?

Over the last few months I have noticed a lot of websites or companies popping up with the suffix either -ika, -icca, or -ica. It always grabs my attention because of our name. Where and why did this trend of the -ikas start? In my own little (slightly narcissistic) world, I would like to believe that we had something to do with it, but surely that is not the case. It has been just over a year since we changed our company name from Blacksuits Creative to Departika. At the time, I don’t recall there being much out there with the now popular suffix of -ika. All of this got me thinking about the process of how we came up with our name and why we chose it. It also makes me wonder how all the other -ika, -icca, and -icas decided to name themselves.

The process of renaming ourselves was a difficult, but fun one. We wanted something original, that no one else had. A name that we could have the exact .com address for (without adding “creative, or “design” to the end). We wanted it to be creative, memorable and mean something. What would that meaning be? We had to first define the personality of our company. If we were a car, I think we would be a Mini Cooper—small, agile, design-focused, and the ability to stand out in a crowd. With that in mind, everyone in the office proceeded to list every word, animal, object or concept that represented even the slightest bit of our personality, or a homage to the type of work we do. Some of these words (a few potential names, some really abstract ideas) included vector, mock, produce, adapt, emerge, thrive, cultivate, conceive, elbow, artillery, bake sale, tailor, protractor, paranoid...This list goes on for many pages.

Next, we started pulling our favorite words, and adding on to them, or mixing them with other words to create new ones. This is how we eventually came upon -ika. One of the name ideas was Attica—an ancient Greek city. The idea was that we could pull all sorts of meaning out of being named after an old city—established, knowledge, community, but we certainly didn’t want to remind people of the prison riot of 1971 in Attica, NY (which is what came to my mind.). So, we cut the word in half, took the “-ica” and started adding it to words from our huge list. At some point we changed the “c” to a “k"—simply because we thought it looked better. That is how Departika ended up in the running. The idea of departing was perfect for us. We were retiring our old name and taking off with a new one. We strive to deviate from the norm, and through our work, make our clients stand out and differ from others. I did a bit (very limited amount) of research on the suffix, -ika. In Slavic languages it is added to words to denote a profession, human relation, term of endearment, document, paper, or to form a proper name. In Croatian it is a suffix denoting a branch of science or study, similar to -ics. We are certainly not Croatian, but I would like to think that we are studying the science of departing from the norm.

That is how we got our -ika. I wonder if we jumped on the trend wagon without knowing it? Hopefully we at least hopped on at the beginning. When will this ride be over?