If you would like to participate in the Great American Cleanup, you can sign up individually or organize a neighborhood group by Friday, April 30th. All group leaders will attend a Leadership Luncheon for training, t-shirts, and supplies on Thursday, May 3rd.

Volunteer activities will take place throughout all seven city council wards in the city of Riverside on Saturday, May 12 from 9am – 1pm. Activities will include multiple litter cleanups, graffiti abatement, and planting of trees.

During the 2011 Great American Cleanup, Daniel Peterson, Owner and Creative Director of Artesian Design, lead a team of volunteers from the Greater Riverside Chambers of Commerce Arlington Board to revitalize a heavily littered and neglected area. Photos from last year’s cleanup can be seen below.

Debbie Johnson, On Target Promotions and Arlington Board Member

Volunteers pictured above (L to R): Daniel Peterson, Owner and Creative Director of Artesian Design; Gary Leach, Riverside Police Department Lieutenant; Charissa Leach, Vice President of Adkan Engineers and prior Board President of Arlington Board; Debbie Johnson, On Target Promotions and Arlington Board Member; Dennis Johnson, On Target Promotions. Daniel’s young children event helped out with the cleanup.

We’ll see you on May 12th for the Great American Cleanup!

In addition to film screenings, select films will also include a question and answer session with the filmmaker. Award-winning films and festival favorites will be screened again on the last full day of the festival (April 29th).

The crew at Artesian Design strives to support and participate in our local arts community. We look forward to checking out some of the screenings. Below are some of our picks, but there are many more on the schedule to choose from. See you there!

Dates: April 21-29
Admission: $5-$100 (various tickets/passes)
Location: Regal Riverside Plaza Stadium 15, 3535 Riverside Plaza Drive
Website: www.riversidefilmfest.org

First Dates
USA / Short Film / 15 min
Director: Sam Wasserman
Wednesday, April 25 / 2:30-4:45pm
A comedic short film centered around an eclectic series of first dates.

Southern Exposure
USA / Documentary / 88 min
Director: Jerry Misner
Wednesday, April 25 / 12:30-2:30pm
Three years in the making, “Southern Exposure” is a comprehensive and informative documentary about border and immigration issues. In order to create a well-balanced film, director and cinematographer Jerry Misner spent time with Border Patrol agents, humanitarian organizations, ranch owners, Arizona lawmakers, and citizen activist groups.

Whispers: The Chumash
USA / Documentary / 28 min
Director: George Angelo
Friday, April 27 / 6-8pm
Learn about the art, music, folklore, and dance of the indigenous peoples of Southern California through the compelling documentary “Whispers: The Chumash.”

Mistura: The Power of Food
Peru / Documentary / 38 min
Director: Julia Patricia Perez
Friday, April 27 / 1-2:30pm
In Peru, food is a way to celebrate being Peruvian. This documentary captures a tantalizing slice of Peruvian life through Mistura, a gastronomic fair that occurs annually in Lima.

The Conquest of High Passes
Netherlands / Documetary / 55 min
Director: Wout Conijn
Saturday, April 28 / 12-1:30pm
In June 2009, a group of special needs cyclists begin a journey from Lhasa to Kathmandu, a distance of over 900 km. They must conquer 5,000 meters of mountain passes. “The Conquest of High Passes” is a portrait of people in search of their inner strength, traveling through a beautiful, yet dangerous landscape.

Since the beginning, the Arlanza Community Garden has been strongly supported by Keep Riverside Clean & Beautiful (KRCB), a community beautification program and a client of Artesian Design. In 2009, Artesian Design unveiled a stunning logo that re-defined KRCB, conveying the clean, natural beauty of Riverside as an environmentally friendly city.

Equipped with their new identity, KRCB organizes regular tree-planting, litter clean-up, and graffiti abatement projects throughout the city. KRCB is also a key supporter of community initiatives such as the Arlanza Community Garden. KRCB provides essential tools for volunteer days in the Garden, including trash bags, work gloves, shovels, rakes, and edgers.

Artesian Design considers it a privilege to work with organizations such as KRCB that in turn support other local initiatives and build a sense of community pride through beautification.

How can you participate? Volunteer with the Arlanza Community Garden in celebration of Earth Day! See information below and learn more about KRCB and the Arlanza Community Garden.

Next KRCB Volunteer Day
Saturday, April 28, 2012
Contact: Jenny at 951.682.7100 x214

Arlanza Community Garden Volunteer Weekend and Garden Grand Opening
April 21 – 22, 2012
Contact: info@childleaderproject.org

Next Arlanza Community Garden Council Meeting
Friday, March 30th, 2012
Contact: maune@childleaderproject.org

The new office, located at 6180 Brockton Avenue Suite 203 in Riverside, CA, will be three times larger than the current office. This added space will allow for expansion of each service area offered by Artesian Design, including commercial product photography as well as workspace for new employees and client meetings. The location is also closer to downtown Riverside with easy access to businesses in and around the downtown area.

Staff members are thrilled with the new building and are eager to move in. Artesian Design president, Daniel Peterson offered, “We’re really excited about this new space and the flexibility it will offer for growth.” He added that anyone is welcome to visit, “just don’t mind the dust as we get settled in.”

Artesian Design’s office will be closed Thursday, June 30 through Tuesday, July 5th for the move. The company’s phone numbers will remain the same.

Any questions should be directed to Daniel Peterson at 951-248-1232 or daniel@artesiandesigninc.com.

The most challenging part was how to make steel look attractive on screen - especially since most of the product was rusty. All footage was captured in full 1080p HD 16:9 format, providing amazing detail and depth in each shot.

Below is the final cut provided to Kelly Pipe. The client has already posted the video on to their web site and is successfully utilizing it in sales meetings. The video will also be presented at industry-wide trade shows.

We all had a blast with this and hope you enjoy watching the result of our efforts.

This could really be great for sketching logo designs. What will they think of next?

Artesian Design, a Riverside, CA design firm, worked with KRCB Director, Connie Librenjak, to create the new visual identity for the organization. The design process went extremely smooth, with one of the initial concepts being selected and approved. The initial design was approved without revisions - even with a committee of reviewers, which included Riverside’s mayor, Ron Loveridge. The ease of the entire process has once again proven that the people at Artesian Design understand their clients and their audiences, and know how to deliver quality creative work.

KRCB is a program of both the City of Riverside and the Greater Riverside Chambers of Commerce. The organization does just what its name says - it keeps Riverside looking attractive through many volunteer events. Past events, which often draw hundreds of volunteers in a single day, have included neighborhood clean-ups, tree planting, graffiti removal, and many other beautification projects.

To find out more about KRCB, visit their web site at www.krcb.com.

It was pretty exciting learning about the whole process. Check out their web site to find out more about what they do.

www.pmccainc.com

The Ruby’s Farmhouse Boutique store is finally LIVE!  For this post, I thought I would give you a glimpse into the way we approached one of our projects.

This was a fun project to take on, a creative style we haven’t experimented with much.  Ruby’s Farmhouse Boutique is an online store for retro kitchen and home items. Most of the products are reproductions from the 1940s and 1950s era.

The client needed a logo and fully functioning web store for a large inventory of products….all just before Christmas. Yikes!  The store is a brand new startup, so we had a blank slate to work from.    But everything needed to convey the personality and appeal of a classic retro coolness.  Now, I am not one of those cool retro loving types, and I don’t wear girly aprons very much.  So this was a little bit of a stretch outside my creative comfort zone - but we’re always up for a good challenge.

We started with the logo and color palette.  After playing with several different concepts we selected one with cherries and red, turquoise, blue, and green palette.   Cherries were chosen as the central graphic element because of their broad appeal.  We wanted this site to connect with an older audience that appreciate the nostalgic value of these authentic reproductions, as well as younger hipsters that just like anything “retro”.  We wanted something cool, but not too cool.  Cherries fit the bill.  Everyone loves cherries.

Once the logo was developed, we incorporated a tag line for the client  - “Homemaking for the Retro Enthusiast.”  With a little bit of typographic styling and a cute little icon - Viola, we have another element to incorporate into the branding.  This tag line was used on the back of the business cards,  hang tags, and on top of the web site as a quick identifier of what Ruby’s is.

Then we moved on the programming-intensive, technology-driven part of the project.  We harnessed the powerful Magento software to create a custom store that operates within the structure of the Ruby’s website.  With many online stores, the store software takes the user away from the main site to it’s own inventory and processing pages.  Although it was a ton of work, we were able to customize the store to retain a consistent look throughout.

The store features an inventory of over 200 products.  It manages the inventory completely, calculates shipping and sales tax, provides processing for transactions, and allows total management of the sales and shipping process.  It also has a customer database system and newsletter feature.

As an extra service, I was able to train the client to use the store software on her own to make needed updates to the inventory.

This was a bear of a project. The creative side was definitely a blast, but the programming side required a bit of mind bending effort.  We learned sooo much from the this project.  It was finished just in time for Christmas sales, and has been extremely successful so far, logging sales from across the country.