But why Blue Zoo?

Whenever I do a talk at a festival, one of the most common questions I get asked is where the name Blue Zoo came from, so if you've wondered too, wonder no more!

Back in May 2000, Adam, Oli, Nic, and I sat in a student bar at Bournemouth Uni as we sketched out what a company business plan might look like (I use the word "plan" in the loosest sense, we had no idea!).

So the first item on the list was the company name! We were throwing any old random names about, so to narrow it down we came up with some basic rules, these were:

1. It should be easy to remember, so no acronyms or numbers. Something that’s short, rhymes, and rolls off the tongue would prob work best. No “ABCXYZ Studios" or "Studio 461” kinda thing.

2. It should have nothing to do with animation. i.e. No “Digital Pixels Animation” style name, instead we need to combine words that are not usually used together to get top Google search results, so we wouldn’t have to struggle for SEO & visibility.

3. No made-up weird spellings so people wouldn’t be able to miss type the domain name in easily, or have to spell it out to people every time we mention it.

4. The .co.uk domain name is available! Even 22 years ago, finding an available domain name was tough.

5. It didn’t have our names in the company name (we try everything we can to leave ego outside our studio, this wouldn’t be leading by example).

So we ended up with Blue Zoo, which ticked all the boxes, and seems to have stuck in people's minds easily ever since!