Browsing the music category, I landed upon the NPR music site (webby award winner and people’s choice winner) whose content has really evolved over the years.  I just went on the site and I am listening live to the Newport Folk Festival (specifically Fleet Foxes) and the sound is crystal clear…  NPR was never about bells and whistles; it has always been driven by quality content and I can say as much about their music site (as well as their blogs, which are written by real / dedicated, intelligent bloggers (not like this one)).

So to summarize this article about nothing in particular with a rhetorical question : are the Webby’s really important?  They seem to be driven by content, which I suppose is a good thing in the laissez-faire virtual world full of bots, spammers and sex addicts.  The Webby’s are perhaps testament to the idea that there is still hope for the virtual age : when newspapers, magazines and books, yes books, disappear, all communication with not automatically turn to gurgles, burps and scribbles.  That and I secretly dream of working for a company that wins a Webby …because it looks like one classy party.

The new Wordpress site for “PopinGays” is finally on the road to completion !  After months of pondering with Dorah, there appears to be a light at the end of the tunnel !!  This time around, we were thinking of hipster-esque flourescent colors reminiscent of our trip to Berlin…specifically an electric blue to replace the original 1990’s purple.  Like an old dinosaur, I am slowly experimenting with color on black as opposed to color on white which seems, ultimately, more rock n roll.  Anyway, we are rather satisfied with the product although I am somewhat bummed that we didn’t have the resources to do more.  For example, since the site follows the conventions of a Wordpress template, it is very “articles on left, widgets on right, banner on top” which kind of gets old but again, we did not have the resources (ie. the developers / the money) to break this pattern

To further open the site to the world and to create a ceremonious event, I think it would be a nice idea to hold a “banner competetion” for the site, giving the winning artist credit and/or a prize.  In the beginning, I thought about Shepherd Fairey’s igoogle banners but I feel, at present, that a banner charged with color and imagery is too “heavy” and robs attention from the site content.

We were looking at other music blog sites for inspiration such as :

• la blogotheque
• Pitchfork
• MFR
• big stereo
• waves at night

There are some pretty amazing logos in the above and in many cases, there is no artistic “banner” at all, there is just a huge logo. I wonder if all PopinGays needs is a modernization of their logo.  But at the same time, their logo is an integral part of their identity (and I always thought that they should change their name (less “gay”) but again, they are, after ten years, a staple in Paris).

Hmmm a banner competition.  Now that sounds exciting… or that sounds like a pipe dream depending on your point of view.

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.