“Everybody becomes so completely cynical about the election process that voter turnout drops to 2 percent (families and relatives of prospective politicians) until finally the “democratic process” is abandoned in favour of a lottery system. Everything immediately improves.” Brian Eno

See the rest of the list of unthinkable futures.

“I finally realized: living life is more important than blogging about design.” Khoi Vinh in his post My Time Away from Blogging.

“Notice what’s special and important around me. […] Now that I’ve noticed, care about it.” I enjoyed Randy J. Hunt’s latest article on Speak Up: Pay Attention & Give a Shit.

“Publishing is not about selling newspapers or magazines to consumers, it’s about selling consumers to advertisers.” Wired Magazine.

“If there’s a default color that signals acceptability and inoffensiveness, it᾿s blue.” Khoi Vinh, on thirty blue icons.

“We thought it was a mistake and made our engineers check the logs again.” Vic Gundotra, head of Google’s mobile operations, on seeing 50 times more searches on Apple’s iPhone than any other mobile handset. Via DF.

“It’s amazing how future Microsoft products beat current Apple products time and time again, isn’t it?” The Macalope blog. Via DF.

“Uploading a movie to YouTube is the simplest thing in the world. This can be proved by observing that the kind of people who do it most are often barely sentient.” Stephen Fry, Compact cameras have arrived at That Stage.

“High trees catch a lot of wind.” Via DVDR.

“Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.” Felix Ingram Via DF.

“I’ve been asked to comment on what effect I think this will have, if any, on book design as we know it. Here goes.

None.” Chip Kidd about Amazon Kindle.

John Gruber: “Amazon’s Kindle is going to flop. Or at least I hope it does.” Read why.

“A man who would letterspace lower case would steal sheep.” Frederic Goudy.

“God didn’t create the world in 7 days. He goofed off for 6 and then pulled and all-nighter.” Unknown author, a designer probably.

Two-out-of-three genre’s latest iteration I’ve seen: “Work, sleep or play, pick two.” So true.

“Don’t try to be original, just try to be good.” Paul Rand. Watch the tribute video. [Via DF.]

“There are people whom I consider to have essentially atrocious music libraries, and many of them are unquestionably smarter, more successful and more cultured than me. And then there are those whose eclectic, impeccably curated music libraries I might covet; many of those people are bores or bastards.” Khoi Vinh.

“When an individual makes a copy of a song for himself, I suppose we can say he stole a song.” Jennifer Pariser, head of litigation for Sony BMG. Nice. I love Sony more already.

“Here’s a suggestion to every Internet executive: take a Post-It note, write “EBay wasted $3 billion on Skype” and stick it to your monitor.” Saul Hansell [Via D.F.]

“The TV business is uglier than most things. It is normally perceived as some kind of cruel and shallow money trench through the heart of the journalism industry, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free and good men die like dogs, for no good reason.” Hunter S. Thompson in Generation of Swine.

Homework: reflect on if/how the quote applies to your industry.