As Far As I Can Tell

Tonight I went to a lecture at Columbia College by Joseph Holtzman, the Art Director and Chief Editor of Nest magazine. I think basically he runs the magazine and designs everything; it’s not as complex of an operation as his titles make out. For those not familiar with Nest it’s a quarterly publication dedicated to interiors, often of an extremely eclectic nature. It’s renowned for it’s experimentation with printing materials, elaborate pull-outs, inserts and die-cuts.

The lecture came off kind of the same way that reading the magazine does. Its fun to flip through and say “Oh, that’s really cool”, but it seemed to lack any real interesting or in-depth content. Joseph was a strange guy, who flipped through his slides with lots of difficulty working the projector, and without giving much insight beyond dropping names of people who collaborated on each issue.

During the Q&A session that followed he got really uncomfortable and kept trying to end the lecture. At least three times he called for “just one more question”, but wasn’t commanding enough to make anyone believe it. He really went downhill after someone asked him what his idea of success was and he floundered around for a while, never coming to an answer and sounding more than a little disappointed and depressed. I felt bad for him.

I think he’s consistently pushing the boundaries of design and experimentation with Nest, but even he knows that experimentation for its own sake gets old after 20 issues.

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Afterwards I walked down Dearborn St. and reconfirmed how much I love the city at night, and particularly in the winter. All of the trees have lights instead of leaves, and there was a gigantic Christmas tree and German village (Christkindlmarket) with candies and food set up in Daley Plaza.