While still procrastinating on doing something, I’m thinking about the design of the cards. What kind of image do they need? And why? Should there be text on the cards? Or not? And how about designing a Tarot that you can actually use to play cards?
Let go. Let flow.
Done. There is now a short text for every one of the Minor Arcana. The skeleton of themes and titles has put on some meat, and for now I’m satisfied. Now, it can evolve as the process continues—because what exactly the cards do, what their factual content is, whether they show a question, a task, an impulse, or something else entirely, is still not yet determined. I have to endure that uncertainty; it will reveal itself in time.
The content I’ve gathered is initially just whatever came to mind—what I’ve learned, experienced, or observed. Some of it consists of platitudes, like everyone is the architect of their own fortune; some parts are derived more strongly from general Tarot lore or the elements. They grew out of what I had already worked on: the research, the wild flipping back and forth, the distillation into a single word, the search for the right question, the construction of a halfway coherent story, and a logical horizontal and vertical structure.
In this process, the same thing repeated itself over and over. Focused work, thinking, researching, racking my brain, making decisions and correcting old ones, immersing myself in the elements, pondering, tinkering, reading. Then: letting go. Taking the dogs for a walk, doing the dishes, cleaning, listening to an audiobook, doing something else. Even so, my head stays halfway behind in the house of cards; it refuses to withdraw its full attention from this all-consuming project and keeps spinning relentlessly. Then back to writing, documenting, and reflecting in an orderly way. And doing so without the demand to achieve anything specific. It’s about processing, not about reaching something new. And then, once things are processed and the mind has cleared, it moves on. Starting all over again.
I wonder if this process was the same for my other projects, whether professional or private. I think so. There is always the phase of concentrated action (in this case, the conceptualization of the cards; in garden design, the work with hoe and spade); then a tentative, reluctant, or desperate detachment—a break. Sometimes just getting up and making coffee is enough. Somehow pulling the attention away. And then, slowly approaching again. Reflecting, accompanying the process with writing, looking for flowerbed inspiration on Pinterest to get closer to what you actually want—or what you don’t.
I haven’t gotten far enough in my books on creativity to have cross-referenced these observations yet. And I’m not sure if it’s even relevant to this project—even though I am burning to know. Will the Minor Arcana feature methods or tasks? Creativity techniques? I’m starting to doubt it more and more. At the moment, they are more like qualities, stages, puzzle pieces: Focus – Dreams – Decision – Resources, to pick a wild example from each element. In a successful creative project, or even a creative life, they all have their use, their reason for being.
But let’s take Focus as an example. It is the 3 of Wands and is assigned to the growth process and the Queen (= the Empress). For the threes, I noted: »The whole thing is taking shape. How do you respond?« The Wands answer: »This can be better!! There is more in this.« And to get more out of that first iteration, you need focus. As the card’s content, I scribbled: »A goal, a vista, perhaps a plan. From the sum of the little fires—the possibilities—you must build one great fire that can burn longer. And you must look after it.«
So it’s not about setting a Pomodoro timer, but about maintaining focus on a perspective in the long term and not letting yourself be distracted by a thousand little fires. But then again: depending on what I’m looking at and where my focus lies right now, it might just be the Pomodoro timer I set to get a handle on my chores when I don’t feel like doing them. In the age of WhatsApp and the like, even twenty-five minutes of focus is sometimes a luxury. And long-term focus? A vision board? A goal with several sub-goals and milestones? External commitment? Extinguishing the little fires in the form of competing ideas and can-you-just-for-a-second-requests? Yes, and no, a bit of both. It depends.
BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOORING
The cards must remain vague enough, less concrete, so that they also work in combination—keyword: spreads—and move the user forward. That in itself is difficult because in this deck, as in any other, many things contradict each other. One card promises eternal youth and bliss, the other ruin and total darkness. In my deck, it’s less extreme, because at least one single card doesn’t stand for career and the next for love. Additionally, I have tried—as I mentioned before—to keep the cards as neutral as possible. Not good or bad, not yes or no, but simply a theme, a puzzle piece that can be viewed from its different sides.
Focus sounds nice and important at first. But it can also mean wearing blinkers. The camera focuses on one point; the rest blurs into the background. There are other cards that encourage to keep going—and letting go. For long-term focus, you need both, and the art lies in balancing them. And knowing when it’s time for which. There are no tasks or techniques for that; you can only decide and experience it for yourself. Tips and tricks for both perseverance and letting go are a dime a dozen. Run yourself a nice bath and relax with a good book. I’ve surely read or heard variants of this sentence a thousand times, and aside from the fact that I sorely lack a bathtub, I think it’s perfectly fine. But it has never actually helped me with letting go, and personally, I feel a bit mocked when I’m looking for solutions to life’s big problems and some uninspired author recommends an evening in the tub. It’s too specific and, in this case, doesn’t align with my intent.
Card Design for Empowerment
On the other hand, the cards shouldn’t remain too vague either, because then they are just as useless. For the letting-go card, the 8 of Cups, I noted: »There is much we cannot force or wish for. And we don’t have to hold on to and control everything. We are allowed to let go. The river flows to the sea, the planets revolve around the sun. All is well, so just let go, let it fall into place. Let go. Let flow.« That’s better than the bathtub, but it’s still too vague for me, not tangible enough. My goal is rather to prompt the user to reflect on their own relationship with letting go—how they feel about it. Whether it’s even possible. Then it might dawn on them that letting go can be difficult. Fear of losing control. And only with this realization can letting go and the relaxed bubble bath actually work.
Managing this transition, phrasing the scribbled notes appropriately, will be the next step for the Minor Arcana. But I think I can only take that step once I have a clearer idea of the visual design. Will there be text on the cards? Or not? The argument for text is the easier interpretation of the cards. The argument against it is the same. As soon as text appears, it gives the user a concrete, irrevocable direction of thought. Say I depict someone on the letting-go card lying relaxed in a bubble bath. Ideally, the image is so relaxing and calming that the user starts to feel relaxed. In the guidebook (no matter what form it eventually takes), they can read about rivers, planets, and bathtubs—or not. Every time they draw the card, they can detach themselves more from the written interpretation and reflect more for themselves on what letting go means to them in their current situation.
But if I write something about planets or bubble baths on the card, the user can never use it without reading my interpretation. The rational mind we need for reading (commonly associated with the left hemisphere) kicks in, perhaps stifling the less conscious, more intuitive perception of the visual content. Ultimately, I’m dictating something to the user, stripping them of a bit of their autonomy in their interpretation. As if I didn’t trust them to interpret the cards for themselves. That is the opposite of empowerment—the opposite of what I want to achieve.
A playable Tarot?
When I write it down like this (structured reflection!), the decision has actually already been made. At most, the card should say »8 of Cups« or, according to the current draft, »The 8th Mirror« and/or »Letting Go« and/or the brief prompt »Let go. Let flow.«
I’m of the opinion that perfection doesn’t mean adding more and more, but taking away everything that isn’t strictly necessary. Reduction. Essentialism. In this spirit, I might come up with a symbol for the Cups/Mirrors or some kind of graphic system so that only the image and somehow the number and element appear on the card. Perhaps distributed in the top-left and bottom-right corners, like in a deck of playing cards. I like that. Always have. It calms me. And it allows you to fan the cards out in your hand and see their values. It makes them playable, come to think of it. Maybe I’ll even use the symbols from the French or German suits as a foundation? Then add a meaningful illustration, and everything else—all the explanations, interpretations, exercises, and whatnot—is banished to a completely different place as optional reading. It contradicts my initial idea, but I find my own reasoning here compelling: leaving the interpretive competence to the user and offering text-based input as an option, but not forcing it upon them.*
KILL YOUR DARLINGS!
A part of me is screaming out loud because this isn’t what I wanted at all, and in the end, I’m doing it exactly like every other Tarot creator has done it. Not original enough! Just another copy! I’m betraying my own ideas!
Another part of me knows that’s nonsense. For one thing, you don’t necessarily have to reinvent the wheel if it’s already rolling. And secondly—and to me, this is the much more crucial aspect in my self-reflection—I arrived at this solution via a complete detour, after grappling with various alternatives throughout my creative process.
In other words: If someone asks why I decided on cards without text, my answer isn’t »that’s just how it’s done« or »I couldn’t think of anything better.« It is something like: »Because throughout the process, I came to the conclusion that empowering the user and stimulating their individual interpretation and intuitive skills is more important to me than the overly simple, concrete, and spoon-fed grasping of so-called card meanings which ultimately only reflect my own interpretation.«
Yes, sometimes you have to let go of your own ideas and brainchildren and admit to yourself that they aren’t quite as brilliant as you once thought. Let go. Let flow.**
* Yes!!!
** Apparently, at this stage I hadn’t realized yet that a Tarot using French suits—a playable Tarot that isn’t a Tarock—is actually quite original. Goodness, what a fool I was. It’s wild; if I hadn’t written all this down in such painstaking detail, I wouldn’t have the slightest memory of it today. As I read this now, I’m actually quite excited to see what happens next …
What do you think? Maybe you are a Tarot reader, a Poker champion, a card designer or just someone who came across this post by accident.
I’d love to read your opinion on these thoughts about images, text, empowerment, suits and playability (is that actually a word?). Leave a comment, if you like!
