Hasta La Ideas

Coup de cœur pour ce clip réalisé à la Arri Alexa par Jodeb pour illustrer le morceau « Lionhearted » de Porter Robinson and Urban Cone. Un grand travail du réalisateur canadien, qui s’est par ailleurs occupé des effets visuels, proposant ainsi de suivre un bande de jeunes apportant de la couleur et des effets de glitch.

Having a clean and organized refrigerator can help save you time when planning what to eat for meals and money on groceries. We’ve talked about organizing your refrigerator before, but there are additional suggestions that might help you to save even more time and money.

Start organizing your refrigerator by removing all of the food. Toss anything that is no longer edible or is past its expiration date. Place the food you intend to keep in a cooler with a few ice packs to keep it cold while you work.

It is important to clean and sanitize your refrigerator. Cleaning is the process of removing food and grime from a surface. Sanitizing is the process of reducing the number of microorganisms (germs) to a safe level. If the surfaces in your refrigerator are not clean, the sanitizer will not have a good contact with the surfaces and it will be impossible for the sanitizer to kill germs. Also, some sanitizers, such as bleach, react with organic matter (food) and will be less effective if the surface is not properly cleaned.

Remove the shelves and scrub them with warm soapy water. An old toothbrush can be useful to clean out small cracks and crannies. Rinse the refrigerator parts well and dry them with a clean towel. Clean and dry the inside walls of the refrigerator as well.

A diluted bleach solution (1 part bleach, 4 parts water) or sanitizing wipes can be used to disinfect the shelves and racks as well as the inside of the refrigerator.

Clean the outsides of bottles and jars before returning them to the refrigerator. Not only do gunky bottles make a mess, bacteria and germs love to grow in the mess. Remember to clean the outside of the refrigerator as well, especially the door handles.

When returning food items to the refrigerator, think about what is used most often and what is used least often. The foods used most often should be put just inside the door to minimize the length of time the door is open. This may save on energy bills but also reduce meal preparation time, as the foods used most often are closest to where you need them.

Group similar condiments together in baskets. By putting all the salad dressings in one basket you only need to grab that basket from the refrigerator and place it on the table when you make salad for dinner. Small baskets prevent small items from getting lost in the back of the refrigerator. You can also use baskets to contain small round cheeses, cheese slices and cheese sticks, mini yogurt containers and soy sauce, and ketchup packets for lunches.

It is a good idea to group leftovers on one shelf. Use clear plastic containers to store leftovers so it is easy to see what is in each container. Label the leftovers so that family members will know how long the container has been in the refrigerator and when it should be thrown out. A piece of masking tape and a marker make it easy to label containers, so keep these items handy.

Refrigerators are designed to keep foods cold enough to prevent food spoilage. The temperature of your refrigerator should be between 32ºF and 39ºF (0ºC and 4ºC). Freezer temperature should be 0ºF (-18ºC) which stops bacterial growth.

Use a specially designed thermometer and adjust the refrigerator dials to ensure that you’ve reached these temperatures. It may take a day or two of adjusting your refrigerator dials to ensure you’ve achieved the correct temperature.

A few more tips…

• Clean out the refrigerator before grocery shopping — you’ll be able to get a better sense of what you have and have space to store what you buy.
• Dispose of old leftovers just before trash day — you won’t smell up your kitchen with the odor of rotting food.
• If you keep raw meat in the refrigerator, ensure that the drippings do not fall on fresh produce or already cooked foods. If you do not have a “meat drawer,” store or defrost meat on a plastic tray that you can remove and easily clean and disinfect.
• Use a corner cupboard organizer to stack plates of food and maximize vertical space.

If your refrigerator is organized it is much easier to clean. Remember: Clean refrigerators are healthy refrigerators!

Let Unclutterer help you get your home or office organized. Subscribe to our helpful product shipments from Quarterly today.

From jazzy abstraction to digital tools, Gavin Lucas picks out the styles that illustrators have recently been drawn to…

The July issue of CR is a trends special, where we identify and analyse the latest creative trends in in type, photography, illustration, commercials, music, tech, webdesign, colour and logo design. For more info on subscribing click here for print, or check out CR on the iPad here.

(Above: Rob Flowers‘ illustration for an article in Bloomberg Businessweek about new TV show Beat the House)

Enough Postmodernism

Without a doubt, the biggest illustration trend currently in the grip of the zeitgeist is the influence of the 1980s postmodern style of The Memphis Group. A proliferation of zig zags, dots, wobbly lines, geometric shapes, bright colours, fuzzy gradients (and the occasional pot plant) has all but taken over the world of graphic art in the last year or two.

Couple this illustrative style with a no-messing bold weight of a sans serif font (like Adobe’s Avenir or Hoefler & Frere-Jones’ Gotham Bold) and you’ve got yourself the most in-vogue (widely copied) graphic style of the moment – and one which has permeated every product and brand iteration imaginable from magazine editorial and book design through to graphic identity, record sleeve design and clothing. Heck, Adidas just released a Memphis Group-inspired sneaker (below: the ZX 9000 Memphis Group). Students beware: creating work in this style will have the opposite effect of setting you apart from the competition.

Painterly, jazzy abstraction

Perhaps a natural progression from postmodernism, and moving further away from computer-generated illustration, is a much more hands-on, freeform approach demonstrated by a steadily growing number of practitioners. There are still plenty of wobbly lines but dots and geometric shapes are replaced by splats, brush strokes and different textures.

UK-based image-maker Pat Bradbury is an illustration graduate of the University of Brighton who uses paint and cut paper to create textured and vibrant collages that have something of a jolly and abstract disposition. Finnish illustrator Linda Linko uses similar methods and similarly imperfect shapes, humour, and hand-rendered, brushstroke type to make posters, magazine covers, and patterns for textiles. There are also signs of this kind of approach developing in recent work by other illustrators including UK-based Ed Cheverton, Cyprus-based Anna Kövecses and Spanish designer Jorge Primo.

(Below: Kövescses‘ packaging design for Japanese sweet cookie Kawara Senbei, launched at the Setouchi Art Triennale in 2013).

Character-based narrative

Character-based narrative illustration – the kind of illustration that comic strips are made of – was perhaps once solely the domain of youth brands. However, it is now increasingly of interest to all kinds of brands and agencies wishing to tell complex stories with wit, charm, humour and irreverence whilst appealing to a certain youthful demographic.

Artists who tend to draw in black outline, including Andy Rementer, McBess, Rob Flowers (lead image) and Rami Niemi, are being commissioned to create narrative, character-based work for sophisticated magazine titles such as Apartamento, Bloomberg Businessweek and The New York Times, as well as for clients including The British Museum, Google, Which? and Transport for London.

Pattern and production

It’s easier than ever for illustrators to connect with craftspeople and manufacturers (and vice versa) who can help them create their dream products – from gift cards and wrapping paper to tote bags, tea towels and cushions through to hand woven wool rugs. While websites such as Etsy and tools like Shopify make it easier than ever to set up shop and start selling product, clever use of social media can take care of marketing and promotion. As a result, more and more illustration portfolios include pattern-based work which, in some cases, is then picked up by brands who also want to work with illustrators to create patterned products.

I particularly like Ruby Taylor’s self-initiated hand-drawn repeat patterns, the painterly illustrated wrapping papers that Charlotte Trounce recently created to sell through WRAP, and the wallpapers and fabric designs by Kristjana S Williams for Osborne & Little’s Spring/Summer 2014 collection.

The cushions and rugs that Finnish company Tikau hand-embroidered with Lotta Nieminen’s illustration work are pretty special too.

(Above: one of a series of self-initiated hand-drawn patterns by Taylor. Below: hand-embroidered Helsinki-themed pillow designed by Nieminen for Tikau, a Finnish company, which combines Scandin-avian design and Indian handicraft traditions, employing artisans in rural India).

Digital tools for maximum impact

Every illustrator should have a portfolio website where prospective clients can peruse their recent projects. However, by using simple looping animated gifs, some enterprising young illustrators are making their websites more impactful than those of their peers. We signed Ed Carvalho-Monaghan to Outline Artists partly on the strength of his first website, on which every project was represented by a brightly coloured animated gif that beckoned you to click it and find out more. Illustrators and animators such as Jack Cunningham and Robin Davey also have similarly dynamic websites, both of which are Tumblr sites which make sharing of posts very easy, thus increasing traffic and garnering followers.

Other illustrators such as Jean Jullien and Gemma Correl, for example, favour Instagram as a nifty means to showcase new personal work (and their personalities in the process) on a daily basis. They have tens of thousands of followers as a result. The tools exist, and the pro-active illustrator who understands how to use them to give their work maximum impact to reach ever larger audiences across various channels will be rewarded with shares, follows and, with a bit of luck, commissions.

(Below: treehouse illustration by Robin Davey for Brussels Airlines magazine b.spirit)

Gavin Lucas is a former CR senior writer who is now at illustration agency Outline Artists, outlineartists.com

L’artiste italien basé à Amsterdam Rocco Pezzella a récemment présenté début juin à la Kallenbach Gallery « Quid », un projet autour de la modélisation de visages à travers le bois. Des créations d’une grande qualité, jouant sur les formes géométriques à découvrir dans la suite en images mais aussi à travers une vidéo.

Le photographe Suisse Cyril Porchet nous fait découvrir cette série impressionnante d’autels d’églises baroques situés en Espagne, en Autriche et en Allemagne. La surabondance de détails fait disparaitre tout sens de la perspective et de la profondeur. Chaque autel est unique, de part ses symboles et ses représentations mystiques.