Interview with Marty Neumeier: A babe falls in the woods

Graphis, Mar/Apr 2002 by Barnett, Chris

Graphis: So why not teach a class at Stanford or endow a chair at Art Center College?

Neumeier: I started thinking about what kind of business I could do and enjoy and sell sometime in the future if I needed to. One morning I just woke up with a smile on my face and thought a magazine would be it. My best friend, a great graphic designer in the Valley named Gordon Mortensen and I talked about doing this together. He realized the risk was too dangerous for him, so I decided to go ahead with it alone.

Graphis: You thought you were able to straddle two chariots at full gallop?

Neumeier: I only intended to keep the design studio going during the launch years, and once the rocket had escaped the atmosphere, I expected it to keep going under its own power. That really never happened and that probably should have been a sign to me that it wasn't working out as I thought it would.

Graphis: When you decided to change your life, what did your wife Eileen say or did you have a pipeline to Silicon Valley venture capitalists?

Neumeier: It never even occurred to me that "vulture capitalists," as we call them, would be interested in something this small. Critique could probably support a family but not an entire corporation plus venture capitalists. Anyway, I probably would have wasted the money on all the wrong things if someone had given it to me. It was better to be a penny pincher with my own money and take it step by step.

Graphis: But what did your wife actually say when you told her, "I want to start a magazine?"

Neumeier: Actually, I asked her what she thought of the idea and of investing our own money and she said, "Failure is impossible." She supported me 100%. My design staff was pretty worried but my wife came to the studio and told them the same thing: "Failure is impossible."

Graphis: What was the magazine's mission? Did you envision Critique as a journal of critical discourse on graphic design?

Neumeier: My mission was to mentor designers through the vehicle of criticism. I wanted a community of the best designers-the community of Critique-to get involved as teachers and mentors for the rest of the community. We would mentor each other and the young people coming up.

Graphis: Why was this so important and really different from, say, How magazine which is instructional, and in a sense, teaching techniques?

Neumeier: We would be different. For the last ten years, people have been saying criticism is what's missing in graphic design. We're not critical of our work and we can't become a mature profession until we become critical. Actually, criticism has branched off in two directions. One is cultural criticism-the role of design in the culture. I'm not interested in that. I'm interested in practical criticism, which is about becoming a better, more influential, more powerful designer.

Graphis: You are one of the very few designers who have really mastered the written word. Did you feel graceful, editorial prose was missing in design or design publications?

Neumeier: I don't want to put down any other magazines because I was always happy with the writing in Communication Arts and Print. I hoped we could do a better job by setting the bar a little higher. We had five layers of editing while most design magazines have one or two layers. We were trying to be The New Yorker of design magazines, a goal we knew we'd never reach. But I think we surprised ourselves at how well we were able to deliver the words. We didn't feel it was necessary to the success of the magazine. It was just something we wanted to do.