Looking for some ideas of for an alternative display of Full Name@Company Name

Question

I'm trying to find a sexy/elegant way of displaying a user's full name and the company they represent.

Currently, I'm doing Full Name@Company Name, for example Bob Smith@Microsoft or Sally Smith@Adobe Inc

This is confusing our users into thinking these are EMAIL addresses. Also of importance is the Full Name and Company Name are links, so they are usually underlined.

Some alternatives that I'm thinking about are:

Bob Smith of Microsoft
(I don't like this one as it sounds too regal)

Bob Smith/Microsoft

Bob Smith·Microsoft

Any other ideas? Again this is something simple, but important because we display this information everywhere in the application so it needs to be compact (single-line), direct, and obvious that it's not an email address.

Answer 1

You can try this:

Bill Gates, Microsoft

— very light, but you cannot enumerate several names in a single line. Or

Bill Gates (Microsoft), Steve Jobs (Apple)

— heavier a little, but there’s an obvious distinction between a name and a company.

Neither of these variants use any kind of special symbols, so they should not confuse users of your app.

Answer 2

My suggestion:

Bill Gates, Microsoft

with a comma or dash after if there is more text following.

If you want something sexier, and this is a fixed size item and not for running text, then finding a way to lose the one line restriction without losing the compactness could be good. Stacking vertically makes it more like a business card, trading width for height.

Answer 3

Try this

Answer 4

The company name being a link makes things interesting. I generally make sub titles a lighter color, but if the company name is going to be a link playing with color probably isn't the best route to take.

When you boil this problem down, however, there are two rules to follow: separate the two labels, put emphasis on the more important label for hierarchy. The best way to do this given the additional criteria is probably like this:

Bill Gates Microsoft

You can also try lowercasing the company name to make it seem less significant.

Bill Gates microsoft

I suggest letting the change in font-weight and color be your delimiter rather than using a slash, colon, comma, parens, tilde, pipe, or whatever else.

Answer 5

Try this

Bill Gates, Microsoft - Steve Jobs, Apple

or

Bill Gates, Microsoft • Steve Jobs, Apple

Answer 6

I would suggest following approach.

<User full name><space><|><space><Company Name>

you can use / or - or ~ instead of pipe character..

you can compare this various symbols at http://jsfiddle.net/svryj/1/

adding spaces between two hyperlinks gives user an idea that there are two separate links instead of one.

Answer 7

I would use terse phrasing and text styles:

Microsoft’s Bill Gates

---

Google’s Eric Schmidt

---

Tom’s of Maine’s Jack Kindness

Answer 8

Bill Gates <Microsoft> | Steve Jobs <Apple> | Bill Joy <Java|Sun Microsystems>

EDIT: Well since my suggestion is too programming-like, how about a lambda expression version?

BillGates.WorksAt(c => c = Microsoft);
SteveJobs.WorksAt(c => c = Apple);
BillJoy.WorksAt(c => { c = Java; c += SunMicrosystems; });