consolejockey

Brian Eno, easily one of my biggest influences as a designer. In the 70’s Eno compiled a list of phrases that he used in his creative process. At certain points during his projects, he would randomly choose one of the phrases and use it to guide his decisions. He would interpret the phrases based on how they related to what he was working on. Later, he paired up the phrases with artwork by Peter Schmidt, and created a deck of cards called Oblique Strategies. For a while, you could buy a copy of the deck, but they are pretty hard to find now a days. Unless you have a Mac.

In College I created my own version of the Oblique Strategies deck. In a conversation I had about the Oblique Strategies, a friend of mine told me about the concept Webster’s Oracle. It works in a similar way as the Oblique Strategies card deck, only with a greater degree of randomness. Basically, instead of picking a card, you randomly choose a word from the dictionary by flipping through it and blindly pointing at a spot on the page. Neat idea, I thought, but how does the internet figure into this. Because the internet had to figure into it.

I began compiling my own list of phrases that I thought might work on an Oblique Strategies style deck of cards. Some of the phrases were song lyrics, some of the phrases were ones I had actually used in past projects, some were definitions to words I randomly choose from the dictionary. So I had the phrases, now I needed art of some kind. Using Webster’s Oracle I randomly chose a word, then did a Yahoo search on that word. I saved the first image I found from the first web page that come up in the search. I collected the same number of images as I had phrases, then randomly matched them up. I ran the images through Adobe Streamline, in order to give them a common visual style, then created my own deck of cards.