Interview with Marty Neumeier: A babe falls in the woods

Graphis, Mar/Apr 2002 by Barnett, Chris

Graphis: When you launched Critique, where 50% or more of the space was editorial, you apparently thought designers were readers. Do you still believe that today?

Neumeier: Less than I did. What I'm finding is that the truly influential designers are readers and there aren't many of them. In my experience there are about 4,000 out of a universe of 40,000 serious designers today. Maybe 10 percent of the potential audience are readers and that's low. In any other profession you'd find a higher percentage of people who depend on reading. I think that was a drawback for our concept. I don't think we were appreciated on the editorial level as much as we should have been.

Graphis: Did you do any customer or market research before you launched Critique?

Neumeier: No, this was totally from the gut. I just figured we'd scale the magazine to the audience, but I had no idea that the audience was this small. I figured if we could get 10,000 subscribers we could make it. We were hoping for maybe 20,000 knowing Communication Arts claims to have 70,000 subscribers. I just think we totally misjudged the need for this magazine in this industry.

Graphis: Critique had very strict editorial criteria for publishing an article. Did it limit your appeal? What was the process?

Neumeier: No, I don't think it limited us. Someone would suggest an article. We would look at what they had written before and see if the distance between where they were now and what we wanted was going to be too far or whether we could manage it. We also asked how they felt about being edited heavily. Some people don't like and can't deal with that sort of criticism. I think there was only one writer we worked with who was comfortable with our process. We'd do a rough edit to get it to the size we needed or we'd rearrange all the parts. And I'd edit it for smoothness and clarity and back to Nancy Bernard, our managing editor for an edit, and then to a copy editor and then to another editor. Just layers and layers of editing as we got it cleaner and cleaner. Other magazines check for spelling errors and punctuation. Our weakest area was probably fact checking but we didn't have a lot facts. Mostly, they were opinions and we were making them very clear, memorable, hard hitting.

Graphis: What part of Critique had the best reader's response?

Neumeier: We did constant research after we launched and found out that people spent four hours reading Critique, more than any other design magazine. The most popular regular feature was "My Best, My Worst" where we twisted the arm of a famous designer and said you have to confess your sins publicly or you can't be in it. We'll allow you to rave about your best work but the worst had to be bad because it had to be a cautionary tale for readers. Another department was a panel review where three famous designers reviewed one person's work.

Graphis: How did you ever find designers willing to risk being pilloried by their peers?

Neumeier: We had a tough time getting it going because we wanted to find the right balance between causing a stir, being a little bit controversial and being interesting but not too hard on the person. One designer who asked to be reviewed and was reviewed harshly-- Rick Valicenti-submitted very controversial work. Was it effective or not? Our three reviewers, who we thought were a good balance, lined up against Valicenti and beat him to a pulp. I felt bad but the work deserved it. We probably should have stopped the process-it was exploiting someone-and even if he wanted it, it wouldn't be in his best interest and it wasn't.