Jeff and I went down to the Boston Public Library down on Boylston Street to see the man himself speak. Unfortunately, the auditorium was full, so we had to watch in an overflow area on a projection screen. So under these conditions, we settled in to watch.

The presentation itself was plagued by technical problems, such as the poor quality of the projection in the auditorium. Glaser frustratingly apologizing several times for how off everything was. I could imagine smug New Yorkers muttering how the New York City Library would never have problems like this :-) Glaser’s PowerBook seemed to have gremlins also, not quite behaving as expected. Compounding the presentation slightly was an apparently case of the sniffles, but this was not a factor. Glaser sounds very much the way he writes: measured, intelligent, and disarmingly anecdotal.

The theme of the talk was “design and ambiguity”. The premise, as Glaser put it, is that by causing the “mind to move”, you make something more memorable. Thematically, I’ve seen this described as “wit in graphic design”; the book A Smile in the Mind covers a lot of these same issues, but not in quite the personal way that Glaser presented it in context of his own work.

Unfortunately, I don’t have a transcript. He said some interesting things about how Surrealism no longer has any value today, in context with an “Art Is…” poster series he did with Magritte’s hat imagery; everything we see on TV is surreal already. He also made a comment how the common wisdom is that if one has to explain a poster, it’s not working. He figured one day that it really didn’t matter, and if he wanted to explain a poster he should. “It was very liberating”, he commented to appreciative chuckles.