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Play Your Cards Right

A collection of downloadable cards to kickstart your thought machine.

The video above is over 6 months old at this point so please ignore any reference to dates, times or my crazy fashion choices. I wanted to share it on here so it has a place it can live and be easily referenced again and again, because it’s pretty darn useful.

In order to explain this properly and in a way that doesn’t bore both of us to tears, I’ll split this into 3 sections

For this particular creative exercise, we need a brief to work with. You can of course choose anything you like but if you need a little nudge to get you going, I’d suggest a visit to the fine folks at One Minute Briefs over on Twitter / X / From Musk ‘til Dawn, whatever the hell it’s called these days.

If you aren’t already aware of them, they post a new creative brief every single weekday on Twitter. They offer prizes for the winners as well as showcasing all of the best entries on their daily shortlist.

Their briefs are all about quick thinking, hence the name. All you need to do is read the brief of the day (on their Twitter profile) and see how quickly you can think of an idea for it.

Here’s one of their previous briefs as an example - "Create a poster to advertise Pasta".

And here’s a quick peak at some of the brilliant entries.

Don’t be deterred by these if you’re not a graphic designer. The aim here is not to come up with something that looks good, it’s to come up with a good idea. If you submit your idea as a scribble on a napkin, that works too.

Once we have received our brief of the day from the One Minute Brief gang, we need to start generating some thoughts. These might come to you quite organically but just in case they don’t… I have a solution.

The solution is a bunch of idea generating cue cards to gently nudge your brain in an interesting direction. All of the cue cards can be viewed or downloaded from here but let me explain them briefly first.

I’ve split them into two categories.

You can choose any one of these at random to see where they take you, or combine a thinking and wordplay card together if you’re feeling really saucy.

Once you have an idea you're happy with, you'll need to submit it to the One Minute Brief peeps on Twitter (or keep it to yourself if you'd rather not post stuff publicly).

Feel free to go as basic or as complex as you like. You can send over a simple sketch or a fully mocked up poster, whatever you’re comfortable with, just make sure to add your Twitter handle to the image somewhere.

Write a brief caption, tag in the 'one minute brief' folks using @oneminutebriefs along with the hashtag related to the day’s brief. In the example below it was #nationalpastaday.

I’ve only used the One Minute Briefs gang as an example of where to get some direction. You can use these cards at work, at home or anywhere you need to think of something a little different.

Now fly free and start thinking of loads of daft stuff because that’s where the real joy lies.

Toodle pip

Dave

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