The Graduates 2013: Come with us into Matthew Hill's madcap mind

Kingston’s graphic design course have done it once again with our next Graduate 2013, Matthew Hill. He’s a designer more than willing to clamber outside of the box and get his hands dirty coming up with new and innovative design solutions.

His work ranges from the downright fun – a triangular ping pong table that you can arrange in about 100 different ways to play with all your friends at the same time, with brilliant and weirdly-shaped bats – to the intriguing and decidedly more serious fire extibuisher-come-champagne bottle, a well-made comment on the amount of house fires caused by alcohol abuse. In case you needed further proof that this is a brain to admire, his Signature project plays on the growing importance of digital interfaces with a mechanical printer which has been altered to give it the ability to portray a degree of personality through “hand-written” signatures.

Here he is, in his own words…

Why or who or what made you go to art school?

Mr Sillitoe, my GCSE Design teacher, was a huge influence on me. He introduced me to the scale and enormity of design – it could also have been that he was the most fun teacher!  We spent half the time learning and the rest spent playing about; I think this lined me up to be a designer.

What’s the best mistake you made when you were studying?

For a project in second year a friend and I went to a Bee Keeping Convention and pretended to work for Channel 4 in order to get an interview with Charlie Dimmock. It all went bad when they started asking for proof and the time the programme was going to be aired – we panicked and came clean. Turned out we got a different interview in the end though!

If you could show your work to one person, who would you choose and what would you show them?

Larry Page, the founder of Google. I think they are going to take over the world and I want in.

Can you give us one prediction about your work for the next year? 

I want to work with more mediums and more people. Collaboration is the way forward for me, maybe even with non-designers. I think working with people that are experts in a totally different field to you creates interesting outcomes.

What’s the best thing you saw in the last three years? 

I saw the Christmas Coca Cola truck driving around the outskirts of Birmingham with all the lights on, playing the music last December. It felt like I was in a Coca Cola advert!

Represent

We are very pleased that The It’s Nice That Graduates 2013 is once again being supported by Represent Recruitment who are themselves celebrating being ten years old this summer. The graphic design recruitment specialists have developed a peerless reputation working with designers of all levels and matching them up with the right positions in some of the top agencies around. Represent’s support has helped us grow the Graduates scheme over recent years and we are thrilled they have partnered with us again in 2013.
www.represent.uk.com