Photo: Carolyn McDermott

No Picnic Press is the Berkeley, California-based publishing imprint of Eli Altman. Eli is the Managing Director at the naming studio A Hundred Monkeys. He took his first professional naming project at 16 years old and joined A Hundred Monkeys full time in 2009. Under his tenure he consistently grew the business while running projects for a diverse group of clients including Coca-Cola, Nike, Lego, Samsung, Miro, and The Slanted Door Group.

Eli has been featured in NPR, The New York Times, Monocle, Harvard Law Review, and The Wall Street Journal for naming and branding pieces. He was the first namer, and non-graphic designer, to speak at the Brand New Conference. In 2014, he published Don’t Call It That, a naming workbook that became a best-seller. In 2018 he released his second book, Run Studio Run, a guide to running small creative studios.

If you want to say hi, reach out here.

Speaking

• First Round Conference — San Francisco
• Creative Works Conference — Memphis
• Designers & Geeks — San Francisco
• UC Berkeley Entrepreneurship Speaker Series — Berkeley
• Brand New Conference — Chicago
• Nearly Impossible Conference — San Francisco

Press

• Monocle — The Entrepreneurs, Issue 4
• Bloomberg Businessweek — "Using Finnish language names to stand out"
• Wall Street Journal — "Why fashion brands today have such weird names"
• Boston Globe — Marijuana companies coverage
• The Guardian — "Picking the right name for your business"
• New York Times — "Risqué names reap rewards for some companies"
• Grain Edit — "Run Studio Run"
• The Globe & Mail — "On the internet all the good names are taken"
• NPR — "WTF? What's wrong with that name?"
• Harvard Law Review — "Are we running out of trademarks?" Vol. 131, Issue 4

Podcasts

• The Futur — Episode 47
• 99% Invisible — Episode 109: "Title TK"
• Let's Talk Branding — S3E9
• Degreed — "Ryan learns how to name things"
• The Orthogonal Bet
• We Are Next — Episode 39
• Grits+Grids — Episode 36