I made a friend at RISD named Susie Ghahremani whose aesthetic and entrepreneurial prowess has always been an inspiration.  There is nothing overtly ambitious about her success, rather, her success is based upon her humbleness, her generosity, and her remaining true and dedicated to her own particular universe.  When I knew Susie, she resided in a charming pink house on Benefit Street in Providence, Rhode Island.  She surrounded herself with vintage bagatelles.  She was fond of crafts and her old record player / vinyl collection.  She played music on a child’s xylophone years before the idea became mainstream.  She lived alone but her doors were always open, even to existential loners such as myself.  Everything Susie touched was with craft, care and meticulous attention to detail, I remember she wrote me a note and sealed it in an envelope that she made out of an old topographical map, that she sewed together with red yarn.  I could never imagine Susie giving someone a Hallmark card… I believe that if she did, Hell would freeze over.

In any case, I remember visiting her family in San Diego… her family was just as generous.  Her mother, in particular, is a character that I will never forget, she is someone completely open to the universe, an open spirit.  I remember her catch phrase when she drove us around in her car and she’d say, “We’re not lost, we’re on a discovery tour!”  I was there a very short amount of time, but it was a moment that left an impression.

Arguably, boygirlparty was born somewhere out of the Japanese “kawaii” movement (I’m not sure if there is an appropriate name or if it’s actually a movement), where iconic characters are born and then breathe and exist in various trickets and merchandise such as note pads, key chains, wallets, etc.  These are not items that we necessarily need but they are full of charm and humor and they make great gifts.  These characters (eg. Hello Kitty, Kiropi, Afro Ken) do not exist in comic books or any other folkloric narrative, rather they are brought to life by some sort of a consumer fetishism (sorry to use a Marx reference).  I would not say that Susie falls into this category, per se.  Her work is defined by reoccuring nature / music oriented motifs that are very whimisical yet very adult at the same time.   She often fills her work with intricate patterns (see detail) that have a very subconscious Persian feel, whether intentional or not.  Her colors verge on “cool” and subdued.

Susie’s attention to pattern (repetition / motif) lends itself very well to web design and her site has a feeling, as does all of Susie’s work, that it was made by hand.  She repeatedly uses a cursive-like typography that is reminiscent of her actual handwriting (and in many cases, she uses her own handwriting) and she pays meticulous attention to the texture and background of each page.  Each page breathes its own life and yet somehow remains a part of the whole.  Her site is comprised almost entirely of images / rollover images / image-ready sliced up layouts which surprisingly has done nothing to hinder her referencing (her sitemap is very well referenced on Google).  This is perhaps due in part to her meticulous “alt” tags (see detail above) where she does not hesitate to infuse her images with search engine friendly detail.  Her site is incredibly functional given its technical simplicity and it says to anyone equipped with Photoshop that nothing prevents you from creating your own universe on the web, not to mention, your own very successful e-commerce.   A mountain is composed of so many grains of sand, or so they say, and in my opinion, a good web site is composed of a hundred, a thousand details.  In boygirlparty, no detail is overlooked, everything meshes with Susie’s style, a style infused with nature, music and love.

Susie is an illustrator and a scavenger of materials and this translates seemlessly to her virtual world.  In France people are often limited and confined to their designated skill, you’re either a “graphiste print” or a “graphiste web.”  You’re either a “graphiste web” or an “integrateur” which often begs to beat the American out of me.  In order to survive in this sometimes fragmented society, I often think of multi-dimensional entrepreneurs like Susie who are beating the odds.