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Interview with Marty Neumeier: A babe falls in the woods
Graphis, Mar/Apr 2002 by Barnett, Chris
Neumeier: A Babe Falls in the Woods
By Chris Barnett Portrait by Kevin Irb
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For most of his life, Marty Neumeier has had the world on a string, swinging on a rainbow, the string around his finger and in love with his work. Who wouldn't have been? California cool, eternally calm and refreshingly candid, he built, in 11 years, a full-service design practice in the lazy seaside hamlet of Santa Barbara, California. Sensing a stirring to the north, he opened an office outpost in Palo Alto in 1982 and spotted a swelling wave of new, well-funded technology companies needing design services. He uprooted his firm and transplanted to Silicon Valley in 1984, the year the Apple Macintosh was born. The Valley was barren, alien terrain to a graphic designer. The cherry and apricot groves had been plowed under, replaced by ugly, sprawling, tilt-up "fab" plants. But the Neumeiers bought a lovely New England-style house in the very quiet, old money Peninsula community of Atherton and set up a design studio at home overlooking a formal rose garden planted with 100 bushes. Settling in, Marty Neumeier made an audacious decision for a newcomer: he would only work for a few emerging companies and handle their total design needs-corporate identity systems, annual reports, sales promotion materials, point-of-- sale, advertising-anything that could be printed.
His first three technology clients were icons in progress-Apple Computer, Sun Microsystems and Adobe Systems for which the four-person Neumeier Design Team worked passionately but not frantically. Every day at 3 p.m., Many and wife Eileen, would close up shop, shoo out the staff and the studio became their home again. Fees were hefty-four times higher than anything he made in Santa Barbara. Work was easy. Life was good... for a while. Eventually though, his clients matured into sophisticated and diverse visual communicators, demanding specialists in investor relations, dealer collateral and trade show exhibit design. Different departments with their own communications needs were cutting purchase orders. Competitors were springing up and flocking in. Neumeier soon realized he had to try something completely new to stake out his turf. He chose branding and packaging for software products but raised the aesthetic bar as consumer marketers were coming in and taking over design decision-making from the geeks and gearheads. He also increased his staff and moved into a real office just when technology executives and venture capitalists realized distinctive packaging was almost as important as source code in making software leap off the shelf at computer superstores like Comp USA. Among the new true believers: Hewlett-Packard, Claris, Kodak, GO Corporation, Netscape, Sun, Adobe and Apple. Once again, life was sweet. Work streamed in his door and large checks followed.
It all changed on October 10, 1995, at a lunch with his best friend celebrating his 48th birthday. Neumeier was restless, unfulfilled and bored. The creative challenge was waning. After all, how many different ways can you package a spreadsheet program? Therapists might have detected a midlife crisis. He likes and collects wine so go ahead and invest in a vineyard in Napa. The Neumeiers both love horseback riding so buy and breed Arabian thoroughbreds. He did a little sailing in Santa Barbara so why not fly to Europe and commission an Italian sailboat builder? But no. On the day, when he should have been congratulating himself on a successful career, great family and a healthy net worth, Marty Neumeier decided to publish a high quality, expensive magazine on great paper to be named Critique. It would be dramatically different, edited for graphic designers who think deep, read a lot, hunger for strategy and delight in nuance instead of just gazing at visuals and lusting after awards. As Neumeier would come to learn, it was the dumbest and smartest decision he would ever make.
Graphis: Why, if you were practically minting money at the time, would you plunge into the risky, expensive world of magazine publishing, essentially taking on a second full-time job?
Neumeier: I was at a crossroad. I had the choice of either making my branding and packaging business bigger and more successful with more clients, or retiring. But I felt design had become a different industry than the one I had signed up for. I could blame it on the computer which changed everything in graphic design. It allowed people who had no formal training in drawing, painting and visual thinking into the field.
Graphic: So was giving up your pencils and T-square jarring for you?
Neumeier: No, but the computer broke the connection between pre-digital design and the new design world. I hadn't foreseen it. I was unhappy that the industry was suddenly full of people who had no concept of the traditions of the graphic design craft. The level of quality had sunk so low, but that's also what inspired me. I thought to myself, "Well Neumeier, you really haven't done much to help this situation." I was working with my clients, making good money, but I had never taught school, never given back to my industry except to the people I've mentored over the years in my own studio.
