You may have seen Matt Dawson’s clean lines and stylish fonts around town. Looking at one of his creations always evokes a sense of place, whether it’s the inclusion of a small evergreen tree on a business card or rocky mountains behind pastoral farmland on an album cover.
The graphic designer has done work for companies all over the state, ranging from branding for local bar Bottle & Tap to coasters for Abita Beer.
Three years ago, though, Dawson noticed something missing in Baton Rouge’s creative scene. He saw so much talent but a lack of opportunities for designers to come together and conference.
So, he and his wife, Ariadne, co-founded Crop BR, a two-day creative conference that features workshops, speakers and portfolio reviews, along with parties and live music. The conference is the first and only of its kind in the city—and it’s only getting bigger. “We’re starting to bring in lots of people from across the country and beyond. Based on our last numbers, we brought in people from 20 states and four countries,” Dawson says. “The first year, all I wanted was like 50 people. But people were interested, and it was 100 people, then 150. Then the next thing you know, we’ve sold out the Manship in our first year.”
Now planning for the conference’s third year, debuting at the Manship Theatre April 5-6, the 36-year-old Lake Charles native looks forward to increasing participation. He hopes to sell out this month’s event, which Crop has done every year since it first began in 2016. Crop even hosted a pop-up conference in Austin last fall.
Despite living in Atlanta part-time, Dawson stays connected to Baton Rouge and is set on uplifting the area’s creative scene. The city is more than where he went to college at LSU; it’s where he met his wife and discovered his love for graphic design. “It’s where I became who I am today,” he says.
By founding Crop here, he’s put down roots in the city, and the conference will always pull him back home. As for his own design work, he’s going full speed ahead with his brand Stay Gray, Ponyboy, also known as Studio Gray, through which he’s created logos for Baton Rouge brands such as Basic Bee Shop, Mid City Makers Market and Rotolo’s Craft and Crust. The name is a play on the iconic “Stay gold, Ponyboy” line from the novel The Outsiders.
A promoter and wielder of the power of imagery and creativity, Dawson and his work have come a long way since childhood. cropbr.com
“When I was a kid, 9 or 10 maybe, I would draw a lot of athletes and comic book characters. I would try to be as photorealistic as possible in drawing athletes like Shaquille O’Neal. In my memory, the drawings were good [laughs]. Being interested in art like that as a kid definitely paved the way, because there was never anything else I really wanted to do that was outside of the creative field. I don’t really consider myself great with words, so the fact that graphic design lets you communicate something with an image, something as simple as a logo, is really powerful. If you’re at a gallery and you see a painting, you can infer all sorts of things, and you start thinking. Your opinion can be totally unique from the next person that walks up, but that’s the power to me.”
This article was originally published in the April 2018 issue of 225 Magazine.
