You’re not too jaded and cynical to enjoy this iPhone app that lets you compose messages using a balloon animal typeface, are you?

Read more at the terrific New York/Tokyo art blog Sppon & Tamago, or download from the App Store.

Box Office Mojo reports that, in the midst of what is probably the most crowded summer yet for movies inspired by comic books, the genre is failing to deliver out and out hits.

“While comic book movies continue to pack a potent punch for genre fare, it’s becoming more difficult to generate a transcendent hit like ‘Batman Begins’ or ‘Iron Man,’ much less a box office sensation like ‘The Dark Knight’ or ‘Spider-Man.’”

It’s no secret why: there are too many of them and, for the most part, they’re not very good. I count myself as a comic book partisan, and I’m almost always happy to see one of the characters from my childhood make it to the big screen, but for major studios to release four major adaptations — “Thor,” “X-Men: First Class,” “Green Lantern” and “Captain America” — within a single summer is just unrealistic.

Two years ago, in a post about “The Dark Knight,” I compared the contemporary super-hero actioner to the Hollywood western. Like that once-dominant genre, super-hero films get little respect today but, I argued, they’ll one day become a routine vehicle for serious artistic ambitions. I still think that’s true, but the western-ization of comic book movies is happening on another level: they’re becoming commoditized and stripped of any meaningful uniqueness.

Read the Box Office Mojo write-up here.

“A series of short videos presented by experts from the University of Nottingham’s School of Modern Languages and Cultures.” Each installment features a short, easily digestible story detailing the semantic and usage history of word like afficionado, liberal, cuisine and more. Totally engrossing for word nerds. Watch all of them here.

This nifty one-trick site takes a snapshot of the New York City skyline every five minutes and translates it into an ‘average’ color swatch. Roll-over the swatches to see the source image. See for yourself here.

My friend Larry Legend has been working on this project and live event with composer Aaron Siegel for several months, and it’s due to take place tomorrow.

“GROUP is a collective sound work that will start on individual mobile devices and ends with participants coming together for a large-scale gathering at 12:45 PM on 21 June 2011 near the corner of Wall and Broad Streets.  Anyone with an iPhone or iPod Touch can download the GROUP app from the Apple App Store and be a part of this experience.

The app is free so get a copy today and head to lower Manhattan tomorrow and take part; it should be amazing. You can read more here.

By the way, this is a great example of how, like the iPad, the iPhone is remaking our notions of what art can be. Desktops and laptops were fantastic tools for artists, but iOS devices allow participation in the arts in dramatically new and different ways. We’ll be seeing a lot more of this sort of thing.

No one outgrows LEGOs, not even architecture snobs. So the venerable children’s toy brand has released an Architect Series, which includes sets that recreate — in glorious LEGO form — works from Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Emaar Properties PJSC and two from Frank Lloyd Wright, including his Guggenheim Museum and, shown here, Falling Water.

More over at Steven Heller’s blog.

An essay from Chaim Gingold, a designer and programmer who worked with Will Wright on Spore, in which he discusses the benefits of thinking of prototypes as a learning process that produces worthwhile failures. For anyone who is familiar with the value of iterating an idea (as opposed to working towards a single, monumental expression of the idea), there’s nothing remarkably new here. But the notion of small failures as an essential component of any success is so innately counter-intuitive to human nature that it’s always worthwhile to be reminded of it again, especially when it’s articulated as well as Gingold does here. Read the full text here.

Lately I’ve been creating a lot of wireframes in Illustrator and outputting them as PDFs to share with others as well as to send to my iPad for portable viewing. Even though Adobe is the publisher of Illustrator as well as the originator of the PDF format, there is nothing about this process that’s elegant, to say the least.

So last week I wondered aloud on Twitter whether anyone might already have figured out a way to automate this process. (To clarify, I accidentally typed “currently visible files” in that tweet when I mean “current visible layers.”) I didn’t get any replies until today, when my friend Matt Ericson told me that my tweet had inspired him to clean up some Illustrator actions that he’d created to do something similar to what I was looking for. His script Export Illustrator Layers as PNGs doesn’t output PDFs, but a stack of PNGs can be easily enough converted to PDFs, so close enough.

Correction: Matt informs me that this script is in fact capable of outputting PDFs as well as PNGs.

Actually, I realized that what I’m really looking for is not just a way of automating the output of various layers as files, but also a feature that (I think) is missing from Illustrator altogether: layer comps — similar to what’s available in Adobe Photoshop. That handy feature lets me combine multiple layers to create specific views representing different states of an interface, without having to duplicate persistent U.I. elements (e.g., navigation buttons or a footer) across several layers. Why it is that after so many years and so many expensive upgrades that Illustrator’s layers features Photoshop’s layers feature don’t act more or less exactly like one another is a mystery to me.

Anyway, I guess I just wanted to share Matt’s terrific script, which you can download here, and also add some more gripes to the inexhaustible supply of user complaints about gaps and inconsistencies in Adobe’s Creative Suite products. Carry on.

Celebrity son and actually pretty good actor in his own right Colin Hanks is working on a documentary that tells the story of one of the most hallowed institutions of my youth: the now defunct music and media chain Tower Records. This nicely sums up my experience browsing the aisles in Tower branches in nearly every single city I visited that had one:

“Tower Records had a monumental impact on millions of people, worldwide. It was ‘the place’ to escape for a few hours; a sanctuary, a haven. Tower Records was a place to meet your friends, your co-workers or a place to meet new friends who shared a common love of music, literature and all things cultural.”

It was really sad for me when the company closed down just five short years ago, and shocking to think that a chain with such reach and that played such an integral role in so many people’s lives could just disappear.

Hanks’ movie is a Kickstarter campaign, and I pledged a small amount, but they reached their goal fairly quickly. I’m looking forward to seeing the finished product. Read more here.

By the way, I nearly didn’t post about this because the number of fascinating Kickstarter campaigns has skyrocketed in the past few months, and if I blogged about every one of them I found interesting, it would quickly get out of control. We’re going to need some kind of Kickstarter filter soon…

From a few weeks ago, a powerful essay about how theater film projection has become a neglected craft.

“Do you remember what a movie should look like? Do you notice when one doesn’t look right? Do you feel the vague sense that something is missing?.”

The culprit is the recent mania for 3D projection, which generally produces a visibly darker picture than traditional 2D projection. Worse, Ebert charges that many theater owners are leaving 3D lenses on even when projecting 2D films; though they serve no function in those instances, those 3D lenses are nevertheless absorbing fifty percent of the projected light.

This reminds me a bit of the quality of voice telephone calls. With the proliferation of mobile phones and VOIP it’s hard to remember now that voice calls carried over land lines used to much, much clearer.

Read Ebert’s full article here.

My favorite bit of yesterday’s 2011 WWDC keynote happened during Phil Schiller’s segment on Apple’s forthcoming Mac OS X Lion update, which can be viewed at timecode 27:30 in the now available video stream. In making the case for Lion’s new peer-to-peer file sharing feature AirDrop, Schiller argued that it represents a marked improvement over good old ”sneaker net,” that reliable but unsophisticated method of copying files to a USB thumb drive and walking them across the room to a colleague. This was the image projected on the screen behind him:

The only purpose of this picture was to illustrate that USB thumb drives are inefficient, undesirable and obsolete, that these drives are an inferior solution to the one Apple was introducing just then. And yet they didn’t choose a stock image to make this point, but rather a beautifully executed illustration in the Apple style, with every detail exquisitely accounted for, including the little ring at the end. They put real work into it. Only Apple would go through the trouble of rendering the objects of its disdain so well.