• MontessoriPublic News first edition front page (Gyroscope Creative)

    Montessori Public
    Creative

    You may not know this about me, but a long time ago, I ran an alternative paper here in Portland. We called it "The Free Agent," and in addition to editing the rag, it was my first large-scale design project. I remember the warm, round smell of hot wax (used to stick columns of text to boards), the din of newsprint speeding through the rollers, the satisfaction of turning the pages in my hand after I grabbed one, literally hot off the press.
    So you can imagine how excited I was when the National Center for Montessori in the Public Sector asked me to help them revive the newspaper it sends to its teachers and schools around the country. It was like getting back on a bicycle after a long hiatus, only now I had 25 years of experience to leverage as I hopped on ... [There’s more]

  • Outdoor School for All brochure (cover), by Gyroscope Creative

    Outdoor School for All
    Brand/Creative Strategy, Creative

    [UPDATE 11.08.16: The Outdoor School for All initiative passes overwhelmingly!]
    Since its first band of Medford sixth graders in 1957, Outdoor School’s mission has been simple: get our next generation of leaders off the couch and out into Oregon’s great outdoors. It's a uniquely Oregon tradition, and one that reflects the heart and soul of what it means to live here. The problem is that because of increasingly tight school budgets, currently only about half of Oregon’s students get to experience Outdoor School.
    The braintrust behind this worthy initiative asked me to help articulate exactly why it's in every Oregonian's interest to bring this to life. From a creative brief I developed pinpointing the advantages and opportunities of Outdoor School, I created branding, an introductory pitch brochure, and a leave-behind addressing funding head-on.

  • Growing Gardens "seed packet" brochure (cover) | Creative direction by Matt Giraud, Gyroscope Creative

    Growing Gardens
    Brand/Creative Strategy, Creative, Photography

    Simply put, Growing Gardens teaches people how to grow their own food in their own back yards. And that's part of why I love it, and have been donating my time to it since 2011: the simplicity of the concept. With the simple act of growing your own food, you get healthier people, a healthier planet, and healthier communities. That's a lot of bang for your buck.
    I started donating design and production of their annual reports but quickly expanding my role into communications and brand strategy, focusing and refining how they talk about what they do and why it matters. That effort culminated in this "seed packet" I wrote and designed...

  • BTA Alice Awards 2016: event presentation anchor image (Gyroscope Creative; photo by Matt Giraud)

    The BTA Alice Awards
    Brand/Creative Strategy, Creative, Photography

    It's been an honor to support the Bicycle Transportation Alliance with strategy and creative for its signature fundraising event – the Alice Awards + Auction – since its very first edition. But this year was different: after more than 25 years, the organization was changing its name and expanding its mission beyond bicycling to walking and transit.
    So, really, the BTA turned to me with two projects in one: not only branding strategy and creative for the event, but for the new organization, too.

  • Heather (photographed by Matt Giraud)
  • Fiddlehead (photo by Matt Giraud)

    Fiddlehead spiral
    Photography

    A fiddlehead curls up like a cat into a furry golden spiral – spring is definitely purring along in my neighborhood.

  • Les Garagistes Product Line Packaging (Matt Giraud, Creative Director, Gyroscope Creative)

    Les Garagistes Winery
    Brand/Creative Strategy, Creative, Photography

    Okay, full disclosure: this is a project where the client is me. Or to be more precise, me and about 30 other people in the cooperative I run. Talk about a tough client!
    Still, it was a great opportunity to take my decades of design and packaging experience and focus it on something I love: making wine. So I treated this client as a real client, starting with a brand articulation and then executing it through a rigorous visual strategy – one ultimately featured in Communication Arts ...

  • Dawn on Odell Lake, Oregon (photo by Matt Giraud)
  • Health in Harmony Annual Appeal, designed by Gyroscope Creative

    Health in Harmony: Annual Appeal
    Creative

    This is our sixth collaboration with Health in Harmony on its annual appeal. This year, the message was momentum and building on it. Our visual strategy was to balance a clean, modern composition (mirroring the top notch healthcare the organization provides) with the faces and textures of the population they serve. Too many families in the developing world face a tragic Catch-22: the only way to put food on the table today is to log and destroy the same forest they'll depend on tomorrow. Almost literally, they must saw off the same limb they're standing on. But faced with the tragic choice of saving their children or saving their forests, they have no alternative...

  • Portland Leaf Day Campaign, by Gyroscope Creative

    Portland Leaf Day Campaign
    Brand/Creative Strategy, Creative

    After a disastrous launch of Portland's leaf removal program the year before – without explanation, the city started charging residents for a service that had always been free – the city asked my firm to relaunch, help explain and build momentum for the program. I renamed the program "Leaf Day," emphasized the value of our urban forest and, therefore, why Portlanders should invest in it. With designer Cat Cheng, I created a logo and identity for the program, and created all the program materials for the first year, including brochure, door hangers, a poster, and one of the best online resources about the benefits of urban forest on the internet.

  • LoriMasonDesign.com, by Gyroscope Creative

  • Shasta Dam
    Photography

    Epic structures like this always inspire a kind of incredulous awe in me, and not only because of their towering mass. I mean, the idea — to say nothing of making good on it — that you could stop the flow of an entire watershed and harness it like a horse: it’s madness. And yet there it is, blotting out the sun before you, powering entire cities below, an artifact of a time when we thought the sheer force of our will could command nature itself with nothing but good coursing down the spillway on the other side.