Red Pepper Flakes. A blog by Imelda Suriato

I won a Jaap Vliegenthart print!

Woohoo!! I won this beautifully awesome, 17×25″ signed and editioned Jaap Vliegenthart print!

How? I received an email from Monaco Reps on Tuesday announcing the launch of their blog, Look Here. I click to see because I liked Bobbi Brown’s Pretty Powerful campaign. I then scroll to see what the new blog is about. Then I saw the JAAP VLIEGENTHART Giveaway! post which said they have fifteen signed and editioned EAT ME prints to send to the first fifteen people who email them.

So I did (Subject: I’m up to the challenge: I want the Jaap Vliegenthart!). Never thought I get anything because I’m just one of those people who never won a raffle or a lottery, although I did win $10 from a $1 Mega Million ticket (yeah, small woohoo…).

Then I received an email a day later saying “Congratulations, Imelda, You made it in the first fifteen emails!” and that my print will be mailed as soon as possible!

Yes!! I won something awesome! And it’s perfect for the dining room!

Making sweet real web fonts

The days of HTML built-in fonts are now over. Well, sort of.

Typekit, a product of Small Batch Inc. (who is now not so small anymore after their first round of VC funding), is offering beautiful, real fonts for use on the web. This means headline or title graphics don’t have to be created and there really is no need for sIFR anymore.

The best part: The subscription-based service offers Open Type fonts from some of the world’s best type foundries to be used gloriously on the web.

The fee is very minimal, but if you’re a super-starving designer, you can start with their free trial package.

Then comes Google Font API and Directory. No worries, Google isn’t trying to bully Typekit. Both companies openly collaborated to get Typekit Font Events into the open source project WebFont Loader. To boot, Google’s web fonts can be accessed from Typekit so if you’re using both services, there won’t be any compatibility issue.

So it looks like Typekit and Google Fonts are making sweet, sweet real web fonts together. The best part, of course, is the fact that designers will now be able to explore web font usage without having to worry about production, search engine-friendliness, Mac vs. PC font fibs, and the need to buy every single font you want to use for comps.

Yes, I’ve been there, knee-deep in “beg, borrow, steal” font territory. Can you smell the freedom now?

Quote du jour: Sirs, you are imbeciles

“These five paintings are unsellable, so thieves, sirs, you are imbeciles. Now return them.”

—Pierre Cornette de Saint-Cyr, director of the neighboring Palais de Tokyo

How so French! And appropriate for the stolen Picasso & Matisse. Five paintings worth over $100 million from the Paris Museum of Modern Art swiped even though the museum had reported problems with its alarm system two months ago. Seriously? Something worth looking into perhaps?

But Monsieur de Saint-Cyr is right. You can’t do anything with them except hanging them in your house. I personally would and happily.

Read the full story.

4Real: Strap-On Tank

One of the best post titles I’ve found: “Strap-On Tank Converts Any Car Into Badass Monster.” How can you beat that?

Apparently some Russian DIY-ers found a way to turn wimpy cars into an all-terrain super badass. Watch it in action. It’s totally awesome!

The Faces of 2009

Interesting project by designer Richard Holt. These are faces that made the news in 2009, made from the news of 2009. Taken from the Evening Standard’s headline board outside the tube station, which he diligently photographed every day for most of the last year.

Can you guess?

Billionaires’ 6 Tech Gifts

This “6 tech gifts billionaires are giving each other this year” list is just too funny… as in ironic! Awesome design for the Hermes 8 Days Spiral Boule Clock, but at $560,000, I think my Sony alarm clock that I bought 14 years go (with its broken CD player) is grand!

If billionaires keep giving out gifts like that, they won’t be billionaires for long. God bless them… At least some people are optimistic in this economy.

HersheyPA.com goes live

Oh, lookey here… HersheyPA.com is live! Squeaky folks are excited about this project, from the very start. I still remember the HersheyPark trip where I won a giant, neon-green stuffed monkey from the impossible bottle ring toss!

Donuts: A Love Story

A missed connection courtesy of Midtown Lunch, “Donuts: A Love Story” is worth reading just for the comments alone.

Bruce Lee: Nunchucks 1 – Ping Pong 0

I know this came out 6 months ago from Nokia, with a microsite (which is just too painfully slow) and a nice packaging thingymajig, but seriously, it makes me want to dust off my imaginary nunchucks and just try it on anything.  I just can’t help it.

Meat Cards

This made my day! I guess you shouldn’t leave home without it, especially if you may be stranded in the middle of nowhere with no food. I wonder if you can order different flavors… like mesquite or honey BBQ. That would be awesome!

Cursebird

This is funny. It’s a lot more amusing ways of enjoying what people tweet about, which as you can see, are mostly rubbish and a waste of servers/braincells/time.

Serious X-Acto-wielding superheroes

They don’t all used X-Acto knives, but they all must have patience, persistence and cool, unshaky hands. Beautiful, some are intricate, some are just fun, but they all deserve “wow, that’s a lot of work!” admiration.

Word(s) of the Day: God’s Gravy

Wiki entry:

1) Gravy is a sauce made often from the juices that run naturally from meat or vegetables during cooking. It is a smooth, non-chunky liquid. {I’m already laughing at this point…}

2) “God’s gravy” is a term used for juices naturally emanating from meat joints during roasting served unadulterated as gravy. {I guess it’s the combination of the words “meat joints” and “unadulterated” that just brings the giggles. Yeah, I know, it’s silly but I laugh anyway…}

Bacon is on the rise

First I thought it was just me finding all these bacon-related sites, but then I saw Tina Roth Eisenberg’s Swiss Miss‘ post:

My coworkers thought I was crazy but oh yeah, bacon is everywhere:

Bacon of the Month Club from Grateful Palate

Save Our Bacon campaign from Waitrose, UK.

And of course, BAC’N.com