Nous: The Name

As any parent or pet-owner knows, choosing a name for your baby is a wonderful, exciting, and daunting responsibility. It takes much deliberation, negotiation, obligation, and sometimes hyphenation. It needs to be a name that will suit their looks or personality, a name that will grow with them and they can grow into, ‘a good man’s name’, a ‘strong woman’s name’, a name that’s endearing (a name you can yell), a rock-star name! Would Reginald Kenneth Dwight have been as successful as Elton John? There’s a lot in a name.

If we’d taken the Mad Men route, today we’d be LOBB, PATCH-TAYLOR, COOPER, SPIRASON and HASTINGS or even LPTCS&H. Can hear your Mum saying there’s no need to swear? Either way, that’s a lot of name! But we couldn’t find a receptionist who could say that without getting tongue-tied and it wouldn’t fit on the door. You might wonder if the letters have any significance.

N O U S. Clearly not our initials.

Could it be Nothing On Under Suit; Nice one Uncle Steven; No one understands Swahili?

It’s really very simple. Nous is derived from the ancient Greek and means common sense or practical intelligence, and if you like a little philosophy like we do (Greek or the lunchtime kind) it refers to the mind or intellect. Taking a leap across the channel to France, we get the translation we or us, and a little je ne sais quoi for good measure. So chic!

Meet Nous

Nous. That’s it. No bells and whistles.

No embellishment. No tagline. No pink umbrella. We might have been Nous Graphic Design or Nous Advertising, but there’s so much going on under one roof we made a conscious decision not to define ourselves.

Our scope is much broader than that. IP is our business. Clarity. Solutions.

Ideas applied across the disciplines of branding, advertising, graphic design, marketing and digital.

Like planning for a growing child, we bought the uniform nice and loose so we had plenty of growing room. Now, with our years of combined experience, we feel like the shirt, and the name, fits pretty perfectly. It’s a quality we look for in all of our staff. You need nous to work at Nous.

While the name is simple, business problems aren’t. They’re complex and difficult and challenging (just like a child), and solutions don’t come in a one size fits all.

At Nous we’re about turning complex business problems into simple, practical solutions that are right on the mark.

We take a direct approach using common sense and practical intelligence, and working collaboratively to define the problem, sifting and sorting and mining the details until we completely get it. That magic we call clarity.

That’s how we like to work and that’s what Nous brings to the table, along with a plate of pretty nice biscuits!

So, put simply, Nous is using your smarts. That’s what we do, in everything we do, every day.

We think our name hits the spot. You can decide if we’re rock-stars.