Interview with Marty Neumeier: A babe falls in the woods

Graphis, Mar/Apr 2002 by Barnett, Chris

Graphis: Your biggest migraine?

Neumeier: Circulation and distribution. Bookstores were easy. You call up this company, tell them you have a magazine and they say "Great, send it to us." We sold more copies in bookstores like Borders than we did in subscriptions.

Graphis: Were there any obvious red flags waving?

Neumeier: Not at first. Our announcement mailing with sample pages before we had a magazine brought 1,500 subscriptions right away, boom. The first subscriber was Ivan Chermayeff. His check is framed in my office. I thought, "If I'm attracting designers like Ivan, I'm really happy I did this." That was a 2% response and the highest we ever got from a mailing. A year later when it came time to renew subscriptions, half had dropped off because they hadn't realized it was a graphic design magazine. Out of desperation, we cold-- called designers and said, "Excuse the intrusion but have you heard about Critique?" That worked for us but it didn't save us.

Graphis: What finally happened?

Neumeier: We were at a point where we knew we were going to drown if we didn't get some help. Taking on more debt wasn't the answer. We had been going five years and we were still losing money. What stopped us was that we couldn't afford to print the issue we were working on.

Graphis: How much of your own money did you invest in Critique?

Neumeier: Two and a half million dollars total over five years. At the Stanford publishing course, I was told you should expect to spend $4 million in the first year just to launch and probably less after that so we were actually running very lean.

Graphis: Do you feel Critique has made a difference?

Neumeier: I do. I think it helped thousands of people get inspired by design and they are going to inspire students. Critique was about mentoring and I feel we did it during our short life. I also see ideas first espoused in Critique showing up in other magazines and at design conferences. Words and pictures are equally important. They go together. You can't separate them. Today it's about communication, not just design. Critique spearheaded the idea in a design magazine that it's the audience that counts, not the designer, not the client, not the awards. That's showing up in the market today as `experience design.'

Graphis: 'Experience design'? What does that mean?

Neumeier: That we should take responsibility for the reader or the user and not just doing what makes the client happy or what we as designers want to do. Instead of designer vs. client like it's always been, it is now designer and client working together to help the audience. Critique may also live on as one or perhaps two books. Now we're also doing weekly e-mails sharing branding ideas and branding developments including web branding to a select community of clients, potential clients and other creative collaborators. It's almost a little, weekly online magazine.

Graphis: How did Critique change you?

Neumeier: It gave me insights and confidence to pursue a new direction with my design practice: Branding for technology companies. In publishing Critique, we saw firsthand that people are realizing brand strategy is the new road to power for design. It used to be that design alone was the magic, the priesthood. Today it's brand strategy and I very much believe that.