Oblique Strategies is a set of special cards created by Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt whose purpose is to provide creative inspiration.

In an interview, Eno describes them thusly:

The Oblique Strategies evolved from me being in a number of working situations when the panic of the situation - particularly in studios - tended to make me quickly forget that there were others ways of working and that there were tangential ways of attacking problems that were in many senses more interesting than the direct head-on approach. If you're in a panic, you tend to take the head-on approach because it seems to be the one that's going to yield the best results. Of course, that often isn't the case - it's just the most obvious and - apparently - reliable method. The function of the Oblique Strategies was, initially, to serve as a series of prompts which said, "Don't forget that you could adopt *this* attitude," or "Don't forget you could adopt *that* attitude."

Interested? If forty-five bucks for a deck sounds steep, you can get the next best thing with the new Oblique Strategies feed on Twitter. You can even pick up a few strategies from the man himself by following Brian Eno.

It’s like having your own Magic 8-Ball of cryptic design wisdom!