Chris Pullman did not own a TV when he began his career as a designer in 1973 at WGBH, the Boston station that produces about one-third of prime-time PBS programming. At the time, Pullman, a free-lance designer, was teaching design at Yale University. New Haven lacked a public television station and WGBH’s signal didn’t reach that part of Connecticut. Although Pullman watched cartoons as a kid in Wilmette, his circle at Yale subscribed to the “vast wasteland” view of the tube. “The worst thing in the world was to watch TV,” he says. Yet Pullman has emerged as an award-winning force in the hybrid design domain of electronic and print communication.
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Failure marked Pullman’s design debut. Running for president at New Trier High School, he created his own campaign poster, one that featured two jumbo Ps, as in Pullman for President. He lost. “It must have been the poster,” he says.
At WGBH–channel two on the dial in Boston–one of Pullman’s first projects was to design an 11-foot-tall, four-wheeled logo–a giant numeral two on top of a Volkswagen chassis. Pullman drove the thing to station-sponsored stunts. “I think of it as the perfect promotional vehicle,” he says. When the concept sputtered out, he offered the Channel Two Mobile to the Museum of Transportation in Brookline, which took a pass. Pullman fears its last exit was a landfill.
Too many mindless tricks are cluttering today’s video landscape, Pullman says. “Designers fall into this black hole of novelty-for-novelty’s sake,” he observes, dismissing a 90s aesthetics driven by the special effects that pop up in every new generation of computer software. “Multimedia is a design wasteland.”
