Elliot Hutchinson

Tell us a bit a about you and where your at in your creative career.

I’m 21, a lefty, slave to the bean, part-time cyclist and full-time weirdo. I’ve got a love of typography, which has flourished into quite a serious relationship: I swoon over hand-painted signs and all things grotesque.

As for my creative career; does a rut count? I’ve just come off the back of an amazing six months interning at Cato Brand Partners and helping run the Look Upstairs conference, daily life is slowly creeping its way back. I’m doing my best to keep personal projects progressing to help sharpen my portfolio, and I’m outrageously keen to get thrown right back into a studio environment.

So you’re a volunteer at AGDA! Tell us about how you got involved, what you do there and the outcomes of volunteering?

I’d worked with two of the girls on the student council who both told me about what goes on and recommended I get involved with AGDA. I’ve got a tendency to jump and say yes to everything so a week or two later I was at my first meeting!

The student council meets regularly and runs several events throughout the year such as First Five Out, which brought together nine speakers to discuss their Passion Projects. The group is a great way to meet and surround yourself with likeminded people and another door for opportunities.

You’re also a contributor for TDK! Where do you go for inside information?

You make it sound like this is secret intelligence... A lot comes just from being around friends and people in the design community. There’s always bound to be someone you know either in a show, launching an event, friends with the artist etc. Once you start getting out there, being involved and interacting with the scene it begins to snowball, you meet more really cool people and your inside information begins to grow.

You were apart of TDK’s THREESOME exhibition! Who did you team up with? What did you get out of the experience?

YEAH! I was lucky enough to be paired with Stuart Geddes of Chase & Galley and graduate Emma Holder. Never really collaborating outside of uni projects (insert collective groan) there was a bit to learn. Emma was arriving in Melbourne from Wellington, NZ just days before our piece was due so there were some awkward yet amazing three-way Skype calls throughout.

As a group we pushed the boundaries of the set brief, starting with three words and ending with 8,000 in the form of a poster publication that looked at the decline of newspapers, journalism and what the future held for both. It was pasted onto the façade of a building that was once the home of world-renowned paper ‘The Argus’. It may not have got the love some of the other pieces received but it was rad.