We were connected with Sha Wang during the fall of 2023. Sha had established her interior design practice, Space 9 for a number of years and quickly gained international recognition for her work. However, Sha felt that the name of the practice was no longer reflective of her work and lacked a strong meaning behind it. Our work with Sha involved the entire process, from discovery to name development, identity design to website design, and finally web development.
Name Development
As we began the name development process, one common thread we had in mind was to create a name that was reflected the unique qualities of Sha’s work—a fine balance of international design sensibilities with Asian influences. During our name development process, over 30+ name options were generated and then further filtered to the final selection. Our team came across the Chinese character 氛 (fēn), which when paired with various characters provided the meaning of ambience, atmosphere—a feeling. This name connected well with Sha’s description of her work—spacial, visual, material considerations all to create a particular feeling within a space. As all of Sha’s work is custom and tailored to each client, we proposed the addition of the french word “Atelier” to pair with fēn—a combination of a European and Chinese word, an “atmosphere workshop”.
