Design-stuff purveyors YouWorkforThem produced this gorgeous set of typographic explorations in which they submerged printed specimens of several of their best-selling typefaces in water. This is the way new visual stylizations are born.

They’re also available as iPad and iPhone wallpapers. See the whole set of five here.

An interesting theory about why Google’s forays into social media (e.g., Buzz, Orkut, Wave, etc.) tend to be tonally wrong. “What’s the main difference between successful Google applications (search, maps, news, email) and a successful social applications? With Google applications we return to the app to do something specific and then go on to something else, whereas great social applications are designed to lure us back and make us never want to leave.” Via Kottke.org.

An unexpectedly exhaustive graphic history of the logotypes used for DC Comics’ iconic super-hero — “the fastest man alive.” My favorite is the version that was used between the years 1959 and 1985, the tail end of which era coincides with my comic-reading youth.

“Type designer Bruno Maag of Dalton Maag, views Helvetica’s popularity with a mixture of bemusement and irritation. So he has decided to do something about it. With the Dalton Maag team, he has created Aktiv Grotesk, a typeface designed to provide an alternative (and, he hopes, improvement) to Helvetica.”

A very sharp ‘radial bracket’ visualization of the 2010 World Cup designed by the smart folks at Hyperakt in Brooklyn. (The final art will of course reflect the final results.) The poster is actually a Kickstarter project, so US$25 or more gets you an original run copy and helps fund its production. Pledge here.

What’s a customer experience map? “It’s a graphical representation of the service journey of a customer. It shows their perspective from the beginning, middle and end as they engage a service to achieve their goal, showing the range of tangible and quantitative interactions, triggers and touch points, as well as the intangible and qualitative motivations, frustrations and meanings.”

Foreign Policy Magazine: “But it is time to get Twitter’s role in the events in Iran right. Simply put: There was no Twitter Revolution inside Iran. As Mehdi Yahyanejad, the manager of ‘Balatarin,’ one of the Internet’s most popular Farsi-language Web sites, told the Washington Post last June, Twitter’s impact inside Iran is nil. ‘Here [in the United States], there is lots of buzz,’ he said. ‘But once you look, you see most of it are Americans tweeting among themselves.”

The designer of a forthcoming Web app walks through his decisions on exactly how much to leave out in his quest for a minimalist design.

“It’s easy to say ‘no’ too often, and forget that the features you do have should be implemented with all the care and perfection that is possible.”

“Parents’ use of such technology — and its effect on their offspring — is now becoming an equal source of concern to some child-development researchers.”

My friend Allan Cole (who worked with me on our Basic Maths theme for WordPress) has just launched this terrific music project with Darien Victor Birks: twenty-five tracks paying tribute to the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn. You can listen to and download the tracks for free here at the project site.