Punchcut is now Paperpunch

A few weeks ago I received an email from Joe Pemberton at Punchcut, an interface design company based in San Francisco. The email was friendly and non-confrontational, Joe believed we were infringing on his company’s registered trademark of the name “Punchcut”. He was also concerned about the impact our theme name might be having on his long established brand. Joe and I discussed these concerns on the phone and I completely understood where he was coming from. I was happy to change the name of the theme.

Paperpunch

So today I am announcing that our Punchcut WordPress theme is now officially named Paperpunch. As you can see, most of the site has been updated to reflect this new change. Tomorrow I will be releasing a new version of Paperpunch, along with some upgrade instructions. I have done my best to ensure everything is re-directing and working properly, if you run into any broken links please drop me a note in the comments. I will be changing the category name on this blog as well, so be sure to update your RSS reader tomorrow if you are currently subscribed to the Punchcut category feed.

Lessons learned

When researching a name for a new theme I usually perform a quick Google search to ensure nobody else is using the name for an existing WordPress theme. In this case I searched for the term “punchcut wordpress theme” and didn’t see any meaningful results. I quickly assumed everything was good to go, which turned out to be a bit naive on my part. Next time around I will be sure to perform an extensive Google search of the potential theme name along with a basic trademark search.