Foundation
Naming
The premise
Every name in the business comes from one story.
Greenroom Co is the room the work happens in. Lantern is what brings it to life with its light.
It is not decoration. A consistent metaphor means a new starter can guess what a word means before anyone explains it — and it means the words survive reorganisation, because they describe a role rather than a team.
The glossary
What each name actually refers to.
Greenroom Co
Head company
- The legal entity. The room off-stage where everything is prepared.
Behind The Scenes
Trading name
- The brand customers meet — behindthescenes.com, BTS in short form.
Lantern
Design system
- This. Tokens, components and rules — the light Greenroom works by.
Soundcheck
Environment
- Staging. Where a release is run through before anyone is watching.
Onstage
Environment
- Production. Live, in front of an audience.
Headliner
Initiative
- The billed act — the initiative the quarter is built around.
Spotlight
Initiative
- Whatever is being lit right now — focused, time-boxed work.
Repertoire
Initiative
- The standing set. Work that keeps the catalogue in good shape.
Naming something new
Three tests, in order.
01
Does it have a role in the production?
Environments are places in a venue. Initiatives are what is on the bill. Systems are what makes the venue work. If the thing has no role, it probably does not need a name — call it what it is.
02
Would a stranger guess right?
Soundcheck happens before the audience arrives; Onstage is in front of them. Someone who has never seen the deploy pipeline can order those two correctly. That is the bar.
03
Does it survive being said out loud?
These names get used in standups, incident calls and commit messages. "It's broken Onstage" has to be immediately clear and hard to mishear.
Where the metaphor stops
Component names are not themed. A Button is a Button, a Dialog is a Dialog. The story names systems, environments and initiatives — the things a person navigates. It never names an API surface, because a developer searching for a dropdown should find one.
Why Lantern
Of everything backstage, this is the one that has to be lit.
Greenroom Co is the room off-stage where the work is prepared — dark, private, the place nobody in the audience sees. A design system is what lets everyone in that room see what they are doing and agree on what they are looking at.
Hence the name, and hence the one piece of warmth on an otherwise black site: the glow behind the mark. It is --warning reused, not a new brand colour, because even the metaphor is not allowed to add a token.