Interview with Marty Neumeier: A babe falls in the woods

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.

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.'