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I grew up with an uncommon name (it's top 100 now though) and I loooooved being the only one. Made me feel special. DH is an average Joe. He hated being known by his name and initial.
We decided to avoid that for our kids.

@mfa_lady: It's literally Joe.

We didn't avoid it! Xander's name is in the top 10! I grew up with a popular name (there were three of us in my graduating class) and I don't mind having a popular name. Plus we gave Xander a semi-unique nickname.

DH and I both have names that when you hear or see them, you know it, but otherwise aren't popular, we seemed to be drawn to names like that when naming DD, and now ideas for #2.

We also both work in eduction, so popular names being used more often = greater chance of negative association for at least one of us with popular names.

We have a top/popular name for a middle name for #2, but it is the name of both FIL and my step dad, so family over rules popular for sure for middle name, I'm not sure I would consider it for a first name at all.

We have the most common last name in the US, so we don't want to saddle our kid with a common first name. (I also have a VERY popular first name for the mid eighties and it is super annoying when combined with our last name...)

@mfa_lady: I agree with what @Foodnerd81: said... I would not hesitate to use a classic name that just happens to be popular (Katherine, Grace, Elizabeth...) but I would steer away from a name that screams "I was born in 2014!!!" (Bella, Sophia, Mia...)

I have some pretty strict naming rules, and the two most important are that the name has to be recognizable as a name and that it has to grow with my child (who is going to be an adult - and hopefully a professional adult - for a lot longer than they will be a small child). For girls, I have an added rule: I want a strong name because I think it's easier to be taken seriously as a woman if your name is not Candy.

FWIW, DD's name is not in the top 1000, but there were names on our short list (Madeline, Grace, Abigail, Katherine) that are certainly much more popular. Our names for LO #2 are on the more popular side.

@oliviaoblivia: LMAO @ it's literally Joe

I just don't want the whole "Jennifer T. and Jennifer P. and Jennifer R." No thank you. I was the only one who had my name and was genuinely surprised when someone had my name.

D's name is always in the top ten. But it's not trendy...just classic. M's name isn't top ten but also classic. S was the only one of them that had a unique name...but only unique for nowadays. It was pretty popular in the 80's and 90's. But we liked it and liked that she would have probably been the only girl in her class with that name, even though everyone is familiar with the name.

I like classic names, but I did try to steer clear of anything that was too popular for the same reasons as many others-- didn't want my kids to grow up with the same name as many people in their class. Luckily for us, Wagon Sr.'s name is classic but not popular right now! We meet a TON of Robs, Bobs, etc. our age and older, but Wagon Jr. is the only kid Robert we know!

I just like different names.and a lot of the top names are nice and i actually love a lot of them but I feel that when we look back they will turn into the Jennifer's/Ashley's of our kids generation. Our parents must of thought those were beautiful names too and thus are popular. I jussy like unique names.

Part of it is just that I'm like @littlebug and feel the need to be different on things. I've always been that way, and DH is less into it, but mostly agrees. And our last name is Smith. DH has a super common name (it was in the top 5 from the 70's all the way up to 2001), so he was always one of MANY with his same first and last name. There were three in our dorm building alone, and it wasn't a huge dorm or a large school. My name is pretty common, so since marrying him and taking his name I've been in more or less the same boat. So, since we're saddling this kid with a common last name, the least we can do is give them *some* uniqueness on the rest of it.

Also, I'm an atheist in a fundamentalist evangelical Christian family. All the younger kids in the family have biblical names, so that really turns me off on anything biblical, which a lot of "classic" names are.

And I'm just kind of a hippie, so all my favorites are just kind of weird.

We didn't want trendy names, but wanted something different and uncommon in our circles.

It was truly unintentional, but both names made their way into the top 20 (top 10 even, I think!) which is kind of annoying since we were purposefully avoiding that.

The names are still unique in our circles, though!

I normally don't look at top 20 for our state. Nationally I don't really care about, but state I do. If I loved it I would use it, but I dread the name & letter of school.

My husband's name has been super popular forever and he doesn't love that. My name was only ever really used for a few years around the time I was born (it was the name of a character on a tv show at that time) and everyone always spells it incorrectly or confuses it with a similar male name. We didn't want either of those scenarios for LO, so we chose a name for LO that's in the top 200. It's classic, everyone has heard of it, but it's not everywhere right now.