The next version of NeueHaus: new membership offer and new design
The first of many release notes by the NeueHaus core team. With this one, we ship several important updates: a new membership offer, a refreshed identity, a new powerful website, public member profiles and a redesigned app.
Last week we gathered at WSA in New York City for one of our favorite things to do: our Creative Showcase, Fall Forum edition.
We listened to some of the most interesting voices and perspectives in the worlds between technology, culture and creativity. We had Liam Lacey guiding us through his creative journey from picking up his first camera to working for some of the most iconic startups in NYC like Cosmos, Visual Electric and Sandbar. Jena Bautmans showed us how you make a tech brand with a certain reputation enter the culture arena effectively, and Renèe illustrated what it means to launch a real life magazine in the city and still cut out a relevant niche.
During the evening, we gave a little taste of what we've been cooking internally at NeueHaus over the past 2–3 months in a close collaboration with some of our members:
- refreshed brand identity
- new work philosophy
- new website website
- Büro’s creative operations inside NeueHaus
- improved membership offer
- redesigned Spektrum app
Consider this post to be the official release note as well as a reflection on our ways of working with our members and what NeueHaus stands for.
A contemporary guild
We started NeueHaus about two years ago, in the midst of an economic downturn and the first AI scares, on the firm belief that the creative industry’s best problems solvers lacked a platform and a real, curated professional network.
Everything we did since has been inspired by our own experience as freelancers and studio founders, and some key cultural movements and historical figures: Winston Wolfe (iykyk), the guilds of Florence, BauHaus, to name a few.
At the core of how we think and create is a specific work philosophy that connects us to the art guilds of Florence, and to the Bauhaus’ typical blend of business and creative exploit. Both these institutions promoted concepts such the inseparability of art and craft, cross-disciplinarity, abundance, entrepreneurial spirit and a space of professional support for nurturing talents.
We have done a ton of work to reflect this philosophy in how we present NeueHaus to the world, from our digital products to how we structure our event formats and our member offer. NeueHaus is a network fostering excellent creative work. A contemporary guild that offers connection, curation and a selective point of view on business and culture.
We thought of our brand as enabling original, individual perspectives rather than imposing a standardized view. A space of abundance where creating opportunities is just as important as finding them.
NeueBüro: how we work in-house
The whole identity was developed in-house in a tight collaboration with our member Tom Mussak, in the place where we craft everything else that we releases in into the world: the Büro. The Büro is the creative shop that keeps churning creative concepts, brand identities, websites, digital products, event productions, marketing strategies and social campaigns. We call it creative operations and it’s what we offer to companies who value craft and care.
While this has always been at the core of our operations, we never gave it a name. From today, that’s NeueBüro, or simply the Büro.
The Büro operates across technology, venture capital, lifestyle and hospitality. The focus is one and only: fixing creative problems in original ways, forming teams of senior experts who can do so in iconic ways.
In practice, every project starts with a small core team from NeueBüro, who own the strategy and the craft. We then bring in the members whose work fits the brief best, a designer, a director or a creative technologist, so each project gets a team built around their problem and made only of senior people.
This year we’ve done work for Axiom, CoinFund, World ID, Langdock, Moonfare, Sanity and WSA, and it’s all work we’re proud of.
The Büro is also the place where we regularly write our industry takes on design, engineering, AI, creativity, business and everything in between. Make sure you keep an eye on this section of our website and our newsletter.
Platform Identity
The core idea of the new NeueHaus brand is what we call platform identity: an identity that works as a toolkit rather than a uniform. It enables our members to shape it and use it to grow their individual brands and shops, much like a guild would allow artists to.
That’s why we designed a new logo that isn’t really a logo but more like a member code: I \ I – I. It reads as NH in the Bradford typeface but it’s entirely typed out. This means we don’t need to share out PNG files and our members can easily use it to mark work or initiatives with NeueHaus by simply typing it out.
We envisioned the mark to work as a sort of community code, a mark members can carry in their own work and channels.
Website as product
The most interesting part of building all of this together with our members in the Büro is that we developed the identity and engineered our products with the same care that we would do for a partner. Both our new site and Spektrum, our members' app, run on the same backend, built on Sanity and Supabase, syncing information about our members and our initiatives in both directions.
There will be more articles to explain everything that happens under the hood, but for now it’s enough to say the website is a real piece of engineering, allowing our team to automate newsletter journeys, app and content workflows seamlessly.
Enjoy browsing it, and let us know what you think of it.
Spektrum, redesigned
We've made serious design updates to our member web app and several functionality improvements.
Member profiles are now public
Members asked to be able to share their profile previews with ease, to clients and prospects, showcasing a professional business card-like portfolio. It turns out this helps our partners too by making it easier to navigate through shortlists, improving the selection process while still being able to click through individual websites and portfolios when needed.
The rest of the app, including project details, posts and knowledge resources, stays private.
New look and feel
We have improved the look and feel of the app throughout, especially making the search functionality and the profile and project editor more straightforward.
The design now reflects a more refined experience in line with our work philosophy and platform identity.
Coming soon:
- Feed redesign with different post variants
- MCP server, allowing members to keep their profiles up-to-date using their favorite AI agent
- Knowledge center redesign.
New memberships: Full and Digital
Over the past year, we've slowly dripped more and more offerings into our NH membership for all founding members. Now we're officially releasing all our new services into a Full NH Membership and consolidating the base into the Digital Membership.
What's included in the Full NeueHaus Membership:
- Access to the entire curated network of freelancers and creative entrepreneurs.
- Access to Spektrum app and our private WhatsApp group.
- Free access to all NH community events in Berlin, New York and select key locations. This includes our quarterly Creative Showcase, our creative entrepreneurs dinners and other exclusive activations close to industry events such as Berlin Art Week, Milan Design Week, NYC Fashion Week and Design Days etc.
- Priority visibility for our partners and Büro clients. We regularly present shortlists to our partners with the best profiles from our network (an important reason to keep your profiles up-to-date).
- Possibility to present select works and ideas at our quarterly Creative Showcase in Berlin or New York.
- Access to our legal support team to untangle the scariest industry knots with ease. First 25min legal consultation is included.
Full membership is now €600/year. Everyone who has been an early supporter and founding member of NeueHaus will be automatically moved to a Full Membership at the same price they signed up with initially (you can check that in your account settings).
We will keep the base membership that gives access to our curated network, digital platform, your public profile and the WhatsApp group as part of the Digital Membership. The Digital Membership is now €120/year.
For more questions about memberships visit our FAQ page or contact us directly at membership@neuehaus.io.
Release notes from now on
This post is the first of an ongoing effort to publish release notes, much like a technology company would. From now on, every time we ship something new for members, in Spektrum, on the site or in the membership, we'll publish a short note here and send it to members first via our newsletter.
If there's something you'd like us to build, reply to any of our emails or write to us at membership@neuehaus.io. The public profile previews started exactly that way.
We will publish more and more content about this in the near future, but for now enjoy browsing our website and app. If you're not a member yet, consider applying to become one today!
P.S. Our last Creative Showcase of the year is already scheduled for November 23 in Berlin, at the cinema at our partners AchtBerlin. Come join us if you're interested in joining NeueHaus, and if you're a member and you'd like to present, send us your info at presentations@neuehaus.io.