Why Herman Miller brought back its company magazine

Last year, Herman Miller celebrated its 100th anniversary. To mark the occasion, the company has been on a bit of a brand blitz, with a subtly new and improved visual identity . It has also been rolling out designs from its archives (see: these fantastic posters ), including its Ideas magazine—a gem of a design artifact that Herman Miller is now republishing as a standalone issue.



From 1978 to 1982, the American furniture manufacturer published an internal magazine called Ideas . This was no standard company bulletin. Each issue of the quarterly magazine covered a single theme, and its covers were works of art that the company still sells today as archival posters, like one cover from 1978 by Linda Powell that uses a multi-colored chart to illustrate a story about how organizations face exponential rates of growth and change.



[Image: courtesy Herman Miller]



The one-off issue of Ideas is no longer an internal company magazine; it’s intended for a broader audience, available at Herman Miller showrooms, dealers, and their flagship store in New York. The theme of the 88-page issue is, fittingly, “ideas.”



“Everything that we’re doing now, is not really meant to be a retread of stuff that’s already been done,” Kelsey Keith, Herman Miller’s brand creative director tells Fast Company . Rather, Keith says, it’s about “harnessing those ideas and values from the past and then applying the same value to the sort of stuff that we’re producing today, whether that’s product or brand identity or stories.”



[Image: courtesy Herman Miller]



Kelli Anderson, the artist behind the cover, was given the brief to design a cover that communicated the idea of an idea. Her concept was a snaking, symmetrical design that readers can cut into a shape that they can literally step into, turning paper into a portal (she provided a tutorial on her Instagram account ).



The magazine includes stories about the making of the Eames Lounge Chair and Ottoman and another about the printmaker behind the company’s beloved Summer Picnic posters. Readers can learn a bit about Herman Miller’s history, like its pivot from making antique reproductions to modern furniture in the Great Depression, and read about its test lab in Holland, Michigan, where furniture gets stress tested (the company has about 2,500 tests, including weighted bags that are dropped into chair seats). There’s a Q&A with the team at Order, the Brooklyn design studio responsible for Herman Miller’s rebrand , and a feature about some of the company’s more than 1,700 patents.



“It’s a very magaziney magazine,” Keith says.



[Image: courtesy Herman Miller]



Throughout the magazine there are interviews with people like Ed Be and Hard Blake of Lichen, a design incubator and studio, and Maira Salman, an artist and author who intentionally edits her New York City studio to only include objects she loves.



For a section in the magazine called “Beautiful & Useful,” Herman Miller reached out to designers it has worked with and asked them to send an object from their studio that represented the concept that well designed objects are both beautiful and useful—a major tenant of the company’s design practice. Submissions were as diverse as a bright red crowbar sent in by furniture designer Marc Morro to an ellipse-shaped pastry called a Kringle sent in by the London studio Industrial Facility.



[Image: courtesy Herman Miller]



While there are plenty of Herman Miller products in the 2024 issue of Ideas , this is no catalog. Rather than selling furniture outright, it sells the Herman Miller ethos about design in a way no digital product could.



“Content can live in different places digitally, online, and social media, and we do program to all these different platforms to reach people where they are,” Keith says, but a magazine provides a unique experience. “It’s great to pick up a printed piece and smell it and see how the design system comes to life.”