David MILES

World Exploration

David was a young adult when he began living and working in diverse places around the world. In the US, he’s lived in Chicago, California, NYC and Washington DC, as well as in the Netherlands, Japan, New Zealand.

Life Education

After Japanese language and Business Management at Georgetown University, David worked as a journalist and English teacher in Tokyo. Always dreaming of becoming a writer, he wrote for a magazine reviewing properties (hotels, bars and restaurants), which got him into travel writing for Fodors once he returned to New York. Constantly interested in a marriage of linguistic and visual semiotics, David entered design school in Wellington, New Zealand, long enough to draw endless cubes and embarrassing nudes of models in class.

Naming and writing came to fruition in the past 12 years working in Manhattan. After 8 years of naming, David realized that Naming is actually in his genes:

• In Sweden (his mother’s side), his great-great grandfather created their last name, [after the Swedish government declared that surnames could no longer change every generation, as they had in Nordic cultures]; Thun (clearing in the woods) + Andros (man, Greek = erudite intellectual in Swedish forests?) = Thunander

• His ancestors, who ran a chair factory, named their various models of chairs with abstract associative names, about 100 years or more before IKEA

• His hometown and church both changed names, the latter of which may rename itself, again

• His birth name: first name as his father’s, inconveniently making him use his middle name, David, when traveling, despite these days of heightened security

Creation

David’s passion for creative expression in verbal identity – from names and taglines to corporate descriptors, brand stories, and executions of the brand voice across all customer touchpoints – stems from David’s passion for storytelling.

Starting his writing career as a journalist in Tokyo sparked David’s love of Asian cuisine, as well as his newfound appreciation for Italian, slow food and locavore cooking. A fan of architecture, and raised in a house rich with music, David’s talent in languages in his musical ear, to quickly pick up communicating in new foreign languages, such as Malayalam, Arabic, Wolof, Burmese or Thai. That’s why he loves “descriptive” language – living language said on the streets of the world, not the “prescriptive” language that proper grammar and language books insist. Perhaps this is why creating the sounds of names from an artisanal, creative method has kept his attention for the past decade.