Interview with Marty Neumeier: A babe falls in the woods

Graphis, Mar/Apr 2002 by Barnett, Chris

Graphis: What did you learn about visual communications from publishing Critique?

Neumeier: That you can't make things too clear. The most important thing to keep trying for is perfect clarity but you never achieve it. Clarity also means simplicity but not necessarily. We never had enough time to make it perfectly crystalline.

Graphis: The covers were always pretty clear, but inside, spreads sometimes looked pretty jumbled. Were you trying too hard?

Neumeier: We could have designed it to blow people away but that would have sent the message that Critique is all about looks which is the opposite of what the magazine was about. At first we tried to make it as plain as we could-the Amish idea of plainness-so the only thing of interest would be the information and the writing. But we overdid it and as we added more interest and daring to the page layout, we got a better response from the designers. At the end we started experimenting and having more fun with it. We would have kept going in that direction.

Graphis: How were you keeping the cash and work flowing in your design practice in the mid-to-late-'90s when high tech got white hot and fiercely competitive?

Neumeier: We were lucky at first. We had enough of a reputation in technology branding and packaging that work kept coming in without us having to go out and get it. We kept magazine work a secret from our clients because our focus on their behalf would have been in doubt. By '99, it slowed down and we had to go out and look for work. It was quite a struggle. I figured we had to work four times as fast on paying work to keep up with the demands of the magazine.

Graphis: Didn't you burn out your staff and yourself at that pace?

Neumeier: We learned how to work smart as well as fast. It was great exercise and terrific experience. We had no idea we could work that fast and still turn out good work. You have to work very fast on a magazine and that helped us speed up our client work. Sure, there were people on the verge of breakdowns and you had to work extra hours. We were all on reduced salaries or frozen salaries but everybody liked the challenge and stuck with it. That shows you what designers really want in the world.

Graphis: What were the painful truths of publishing you never imagined?

Neumeier: All of them. Take magazine returns for instance. It cost us $10 to publish and if it's returned by the Post Office, we pay another $2. A subscriber calls up and says, "Hey, I didn't get my magazine," so we send it back and that's yet another $2 and that could happen a couple times and there goes your profit. I took a magazine publishing class at Stanford taught by publishers and learned that half of your money comes from advertising, half from subscriptions. That means half your magazine should be ad pages but we only wanted 25% of our pages to be advertising and mostly in the back. Our advertisers were really nice people. They didn't make a peep about not choosing their location even though they were paying a fortune at a cost per thousand of four to 10 times higher than other magazines. Pricing Critique was also a problem. We started out charging $18 a copy and went up to $22 a copy because we weren't making any money at $18.