PIVOT Cards
All about my deck of artist prompt cards—lots of examples and how you can get your own copy.
I’ve owned a set of Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt’s Oblique Strategies cards for many years. I love the idea of them… you’re stuck, creatively blocked, unsure of what to do next—so you pull out an Oblique Strategy and away you go on a totally new productive tangent!
Unfortunately they just don’t work very well for me…
Make an exhaustive list of everything you might do and do the last
Some of them are good, but they are often a bit wordy and maybe too oblique for me! I can find myself spending a long time pondering the way forward from a card and just end up needing to pick a different card! And perhaps they are more tailored to becoming unstuck rather than providing starting points.
So last year I decided to make my own set of creative prompt cards… I call them PIVOT cards.
There are 100 cards in the deck and each card has just a single word on it. The key to using them is in the number of different combinations of words from multiple cards. I like to take three cards from the deck and then discard one of them to leave an inspiring two word phrase, but you can use them however works best for you.
They are best suited for musicians or sound people as they are mainly musically relevant words.
A few people were interested in getting a set so I started making them in small batches and you can buy your own set from my Bandcamp merch page or you can visit my Instagram to see many uses of them from the last year.
Mini PIVOT Cards
I’ve also produced a PDF version of my PIVOT cards that you can download and cut out. They are smaller and you have to print them yourself, but they still work the same…
