TexasDesign

Marty Neumeier from Neutron LLC.-a San Francisco-based firm specializing in brand collaboration —the “glue” that holds integrated marketing teams together.

Marty began his career as a designer and copywriter in southern California in the early ’70s, then moved to northern California in the early ’80s to focus on brand design for technology clients, including Apple and Netscape.

In 1996 he launched CRITIQUE, the magazine of graphic design thinking. In editing CRITIQUE, Marty joined the conversation about how to bridge the gap between strategy and design, which led to the formation of Neutron and the ideas in his book THE BRAND GAP. Marty has just released “Zag: The Number One Strategy of High-Performance Brands.”

For a quick peek inside ZAG, go to www.zagbook.com.

Listen to the interview: listen to the interview with Mary Neumeier as he discusses branding and his new book Zag.

Below is a transcript of the interview with Marty Neumeier:

TDc: Good afternoon, Marty. I wanted to start off by asking you, Craig Frazier once said that companies that asked you to be an image maker are companies that have no image. Is that true with branding?

Marty Neumeier: I don’t know what Craig meant but he’s really sure. He probably knows what he meant. I think every company has an image and every company has a brand. That’s one thing that they don’t really realize. Even if they haven’t put an investment into branding or brand building, they have a brand. A brand is the outside world’s view of the company or the product or the service. It’s not what you think, it’s what they think.

TDc: Right.

Marty Neumeier: That’s the big shift that people have to get used to.

TDc: So really, companies like yours, like Neutron, what you really do is cultivate that brand. Would that be a correct statement?

Mart Neumeier: No. I think there’s two parts of Neutron. Our tagline is “Think and Do.” One part – the Think part – is about learning about writing articles, about giving talks, about training people, giving workshops. We’re developing new ideas and learning about new things all the time. Then we apply that to engagements with clients, so that’s the Do part. They get the benefit of all this thinking and learning. We learn from the engagements what we have to learn about next in the thinking part. You could just refer to it as a circle. It’s like a little perpetual motion machine.

How we apply that is, if we have an engagement, we try to get in the middle of the brand building process and help everyone understand what the brand is trying to do, what the strategic content of the company is and then cut everybody loose to do their best work after they know, basically, where they’re going, Get everybody to start to collaborate and work together, which of course doesn’t happen very much now. People are working in silos and we always wonder why it never comes together at the end because they’re not sharing their ideas. We help the sharing process. We don’t actually compete with anybody out there. We don’t compete with other designers or agencies or anybody. We’re a layer apart from that where we just basically glue everybody together.

TDc: Do you see yourself sitting in the middle of that or on the periphery, pushing people in the right direction?

Marty Neumeier: Kind of in the middle but not everywhere. We’ll be put in to do some specific thing, perhaps. We’ll work with the management of the company to set a strategic selection as to be implemented with branding because, often, strategies are difficult to implement in branding because they’re not strong enough or bold enough or differentiated. We want to work with them to make that happen. We might work with them to create a corporate story. What’s the story of this brand that we’re all going to execute? Depending on where the most need is, that’s where we’ll go. We act as a bridge between creative people and leadership between internal and external groups. It can really go anywhere. The main thing is
that our intention is to make the brand holistic and healthy and clear to everybody without getting in the way of anybody’s work. In fact, we want to set the bar higher and help people get over it. That’s really our goal.

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Come to the 51st Annual Art Directors Club of Houston Award Show and Banquet
Because I love it loud, I wanna hear it loud, right between the eyes.
Loud, I wanna hear it loud. I don’t want to COMPROMISE.

for more information go to the Houston Art Director’s Show site

The 51st ADCH Awards Show
Saturday, November 11, 2006
Warehouse Live

Master the five key disciplines of brand-building—differentiation, collaboration, innovation, validation, and cultivation—in exciting one-day workshop, either September 26th or September 28th, at the Stephen F. Austin Hotel. Marty Neumeier, author of THE BRAND GAP and consultant to Apple, Gap, Herman Miller, Kodak, Yahoo! and others, will show you how to bridge the distance between business strategy and design. With fast-paced presentations and collaborative exercises, you’ll learn dozens of proven principles you can apply immediately to your business, whether you work in a small design firm or the marketing department of a Fortune 1000 company.

Listen to the podacst with ZAG author Mart Neumeir

Stephen F. Austin Hotel
701 Congress Ave, Austin
Phone: 512.457.8800 (Location info only. Not for RSVP or event info.)

Go to the Austin AIGA site for more information.

Join us for HammerTime Happy Hour! Mix and mingle with your peers in a relaxed atmosphere at the Molotov Lounge.

Molotov Lounge
719 West Sixth Street, Austin (map)
Phone: 512.499.0600 (Location info only. Not for RSVP or event info.)

Sarah Nelson is one half of the two-person design team of Werner Design Werks. The Minneapolis studio has projects that range from book design, posters and promotional materials to package design and identity development. Werner Design clients include Moët Hennessy, Rizzoli Books, Mohawk Paper, Target, MTV Latino, Levi’s, fX Network, Blu Dot furniture, Chronicle Books, Minnesota Public Radio and Mrs. Meyer’s Clean Day.

Their work is part of the permanent collection at Toronto’s Musee des Arts Decoratifs. They were named Target’s “Vendor of the Year” in 2002. They have been recognized with awards from the Type Directors Club, Communication Arts, American Center for Design, ID Magazine, American Institute of Graphic Arts, the Art Directors Club, and Print Magazine’s Regional Design Annual.

TDc- Your work has a great sense of playfulness with typography and color, how would you define your style?
TDc- You have a varied client list in which you are able to apply your style, how do you balance between creating the design and maintaining the client’s brand?

(I’m going to combine these two questions into one, if you don’t mind)

Sarah- We try to avoid having anything that can really be defined as a “style,” we prefer to think of our work as having a visual language. We can create a different and appropriate story for each client from this language. I think when you see a lot of our work all together it has common threads that run through all of it but I don’t think you would pick up something without knowing we had done it and say, “this has to be a Werner Design Werks piece.” I have to admit we have a weakness for certain typefaces (Trade Gothic, Clarendon, Minion semi-bold small caps to name the biggest culprits) and we like to mix them together a lot, and we are influenced by design history and vernacular design of the past but we always try to give it a fresh twist. I like design that has a sense of humor and that doesn’t take itself too seriously; I’m put off by design that tries too hard. It’s like seeing someone who’s matched their socks to their shirt to their bag and you just know to their underwear too. But that being said, the best design is smart design.

It’s very important to us to really try to understand what it is the client needs from us, not just what they tell us they need, but what they hope to achieve with it. The answer is always driven by the client’s goals. Any stamp of WDW-ness that ends up on the final project comes about not because we tried to put it there but because that’s just how we do it; we can’t talk with a different accent (at least not believably!)

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