Homage to Oblique Strategies

Homage to Oblique Strategies is a quiet web version of Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt’s 1975 deck of creative prompts. You draw one card from a deck with a pixel horse on its back, and you can’t draw another for five minutes. I directed Claude Code through the design, debugging and card-list cleanup. There was no framework, no bundler and no design file.

Role

Product, design direction and QA, with AI pair-programmed implementation

Stack

Vanilla JavaScript, CSS 3D transforms, Web Animations API, Canvas 2D, localStorage. No libraries.

Highlights

113 cards, an endless shuffled deck, a five-minute cooldown, a pixel horse after Muybridge

Try it liveHomage to Oblique Strategies

The original cards are meant for when you’re stuck: draw one, then take it seriously. A random-quote button invites you to keep clicking until something fits. I wanted drawing a card to feel like an event. So I stripped the screen down to the sentence and made you wait for the next one.

1. Only the text

Early versions had a frame, a mark and sound. Each one got in the way of the sentence, so I removed them one by one until the card was only words in a serif.

2. A wait you can see

The drawn card and its time are saved on the device. Refresh and the same card is still there, with a small countdown at the bottom. Try to draw early and the deck gives a tiny shake.

3. A horse for the back

The only image is a pixel gallop after Eadweard Muybridge’s 1878 photographs, drawn procedurally in 12 frames. Each new card back shows the next frame, so drawing through the deck plays his sequence like a flipbook.

Broken source text

The card list had wrapped lines and one card with its beginning cut off. A small build script now repairs these, so the deck stays correct whenever the list changes.

Browser quirks

Firefox drew the back of the card through the front mid-flip, and Safari painted white bars behind its toolbars. I fixed both at the cause: the card swaps faces at the halfway point of the flip, and the page has a solid root colour that blends into the bars.

• The constraint is the feature. The five-minute limit turned a novelty into a practice.
• Removing things is design work. Every extra on the card made the sentence harder to read.

Oblique Strategies was created by Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt (1975). This is an unofficial homage. Horse after Eadweard Muybridge, The Horse in Motion (1878). Typefaces: Instrument Serif and Instrument Sans.