Type a name. Build a painting.
A personalised print shop where every letter is an original artwork, and the customer chooses the style of each one.
- Client
- Self-initiated
- Role
- Concept, illustration, brand identity, product design, web build, artist partnerships
- Year
- Ongoing
- Tools
- Fresco, Photoshop, Claude Code, GitHub, Gelato
- Status
- Launching before Christmas 2026
Where it started.
For years I’ve been painting letters in experimental ways, playing with letterforms and objects as letterforms: bananas, mountains, cathedrals, robots, cake. What began as a personal obsession with letter-art slowly turned into requests. Friends, then friends of friends, started asking me to paint particular words or names.
Every word became its own little world.
“The most thoughtful gift we’ve ever received.”
The opportunity.
Commissions don’t scale. Every name was painted by hand, one at a time. But the demand told me something: people love giving a name as art.
Custom name prints already exist. The ones I found are built from photographs of letter-shaped objects, and none of them combine pre-made letters by artists in one print. So I set out to build one where every letter is an original painting.
Not photographs of letters. Paintings of them.
Type a name, then tap any letter to change its style.
Early feedback from testers has been brilliant, and two friends have already ordered prints before launch.
Play with it.
Every designer knows the joy of trying a word in a hundred fonts, until it feels right. I wanted anyone to have that feeling, not just designers.
So Painted Names is a builder first and a shop second. Type a name, and it appears on a canvas in painted letters. Tap any letter to swap its style. Keep going until it’s yours.
The brand.
![The [PN] icon](/media/painted-names/pn-icon.webp){kind=icon}
The brief to myself was simple, playful and clear: part gallery, part toy.
The brackets are the frame. They hold the name the way a canvas holds the print, and they echo what the customer is actually buying. The heavy, rounded letters tilt slightly, as if they’ve just been dropped into place, like letter tiles in a game.
Everything else stays clean and light, so the artwork is always the loudest thing on the page.
The business.
I designed Painted Names to run itself. Every print is made to order and posted by a print partner, so there’s no stock, no warehouse and next to no overheads.
It’s also built to grow. Every artist who joins adds new letters to play with, and earns a share whenever theirs are used.
What’s next.
Painted Names launches in the UK before Christmas 2026.
Next, it grows from one artist’s shop into a curated platform. I’m in conversation with letter artists I admire on Instagram about joining as founding artists. Each one earns a share of a 15 percent royalty pool every time their letters appear in a print, so the more people play, the more the artists earn.
After that come curated word prints like HOME and LOVE, baby-name and couple-name prints, and the US.
