Geoff Hocking, Senior Lecturer in Graphic Design and Illustration, La Trobe University

A local Bendigo man, Geoff Hocking studied for a diploma in advertising design “before they had degrees”. To payback his studentship he took up teacher training. Shortly afterwards Australia got involved in the Vietnam war and he moved to London, producing graphics for a record label while illustrating books on the side. He returned to Australia and took up lecturing at Swinburne University. He has now been teaching at La Trobe for 11 years. He also writes and designs books on Australian social history.

Hocking says that good design is vital in book production, and that a particular type of layout is important for his distinct market. “Most of my readers of these social histories are 55-year-old blokes,” he says,” and they don’t want to feel as if they’re learning something.”

If the reader doesn’t necessarily enjoy reading, Hocking says good typographic design makes all the difference. “I remember one woman saying to me her husband had never read a book in all the time she’d known him, but he sat up in bed and read one of mine from cover to cover before he went to bed.”

The first to admit he’s been around “for a while,” Hocking has seen the industry revolutionised by computers. “In some ways I can’t charge as much as I did back then,” he laughs. “It used to take 2-3 days to design an album cover for a record label. With computers it takes 2-3 hours.”

Despite the technological advances, Hocking still likes to do things the old-fashioned way, with a lot of his illustration work starting off life as an oil painting, which he then scans into a computer. “You couldn’t achieve that effect without actually doing the painting,” he says. “It’s totally unique, with the human fingerprints still in it.”

It’s for this reason that Hocking says design is definitely art. “Design is art for the purpose of manufacturing or big business, there’s just a slightly different communication process,” he says, adding with a laugh, “Like all paintings, some design art is crap.”

When parents come to him worried about their children taking up design as a career option, questioning whether there’s a future in it, Hocking uses a straightforward example to settle their nerves.

“I tell them to go to a newsagents and stand in the doorway, then come back the next day,” he says. “All the newspapers have changed. Then I tell them to come back the next week and all the magazines have changed. Then come back in a year’s time and the newspapers have changed 365 times. Every day at least one graphic designer works on one of those publications. And that’s just the newsagents. It’s an enormous industry.”

Hocking says that Australia is a world-competitor when it comes to good design. “So many Australian designers work internationally anyway, and many big companies have international offices all over the world,” he says. “The internet and email makes it all so easy. We have an ex-student who did a bit of work for an extreme sports magazine in the US, and now it’s his full-time job. He lives and works here in Bendigo, only visiting America occasionally. I think that’s exciting.”

His own son, also a graphic designer, is employed by a travel agency company in Brisbane. “He does all their design work from home in Bendigo, and he also takes school groups to the snow fields in New Zealand and Canada,” he says. “He couldn’t have done this ten years ago, but with email anything’s possible. You can work for someone 2000k away.”

Over the years, Hocking has seen a strong design industry build up in regional areas, expanding beyond the traditional city limits. “I’m very aware of the amount of food and wine industries in the country,” he says. “The market is crowded and they gain advantage by good product design. There is an enormous uplift in commercial design in the regions, and students are staying here.”

One important lesson he imparts to his students is the need to be culturally aware, but that this awareness has to extend beyond the current. “Each generation has its own language and you have to learn to speak to the market, not just what you like,” he says. “It’s no good my students using the language of Tupac on me.”

“One of the things I do with my students is show them lots of old movies,” he continues. “We force feed them culture. I remember having a student who didn’t understand why apples are associated with love. So I sat him down with a bible and got him to read Genesis, about Adam and Eve.”

“He loved Bob Dylan, and I gave him Under Milk Wood to read too. Twenty years later at a function in Melbourne I bumped into him, and he said he remembered me giving him the book, and that it was a ‘load of shit’,” he laughs. “At least he remembered it.”

When asked if he believes he should produce students tailor-made for the industry, or wether they should be individuals ready to change the business, he says a balance is important. “We do try to make sure our students can work within the constraints of the industry, but if they have a particular strength we encourage them to aim for that,” he says.

Even at this late stage in his career, Hocking maintains he has plenty to learn from those around him. “I get inspired by seeing what other people do and think,” he says. “I think, ‘what a great thought that is, why can’t I think like that?’ I’m terribly competitive.”

Hocking says he doesn’t pay much heed to the constantly changing trends in design, but that great typography will always draw his attention. “Contemporary magazines are often very stylish,” he says. “When I go to exhibitions I’m always looking at the writing on the walls and how beautiful that is. I went to the Frida Kahlo exhibition in London last year and it was presented beautifully.”

Returning to the idea that the world is a global community now, he says his greatest challenge is to get the message across to regional businesses that they don’t have to go to the city to find talented graphic designers.

“When local government and corporations have big money to spend, they often think they have to go to Melbourne,” he says. “I think that’s a tragedy. My greatest challenge is to convince them to purchase design work locally, and that it is as good if not better than anything from the city.”