I spoke to Juggi Ramakrishnan, award winning creative veteran and curator of the Deck of Brilliance, a collection of over 200 creative tools.
The Deck of Brilliance is the world’s largest and most popular collection of creative tools (202 and counting) built to help you break through creative block and generate lots of ideas quickly, inspire you with examples from around the world, and equip you with the understanding and insights needed to sell or defend your work.
The tools are groups under toolkits.
The All-Purpose Toolkit, which includes 36 of the most popular tools, is free.
The other toolkits — Deep Dive Toolkit, Insight-Mining Toolkit, Momentum Toolkit, and Story Toolkit — require a nominal subscription fee. This fee supports site maintenance and funds ongoing upgrades and expansion.
A large number of students and young creatives from developing countries use the site regularly, as do teachers from educational institutions that offer courses in storytelling and advertising. The All-Purpose Toolkit remains free primarily for their benefit.
Seasoned senior creatives use the site too, especially when they hit a wall or need a flood of ideas in a hurry. The deck opens new doors, hundreds of them in fact.
Although originally designed for creatives, the deck has also gained popularity among planners and marketers. At its core, it’s not just about inspiration. The deck is like an anatomy book for ideas. It reveals the bones and muscles beneath the surface and shows how great ideas really work.
In this business, resilience is everything. The most successful people aren’t necessarily the most talented.
They are the ones who keep coming back, even after a string of rejections. The deck helps you do that. It’s an external well you can return to, again and again.
I’ve been in the ideas business for close to 35 years. I learned early on that success is a volume game. The more ideas you start with, the better your final choices, and the more confident you can be.
So even back then, I began building a set of tools just for myself. At first, they were simply ways to jolt my brain out of autopilot.
Fast forward to 2012. I’d moved to Beijing and was leading a team of creatives. Many of them were smart, talented, and deeply familiar with storytelling. But I noticed they hadn’t been exposed to the full range of
what advertising could be. So I started running weekly “exposure sessions” using my tools to broaden their perspective.
What began as a small internal habit gradually grew into something much bigger. Before long, I was giving lectures across various Ogilvy offices. In 2016, with a nudge from my colleagues Todd McCracken and Graham Fink, I decided to take the plunge and share the tools publicly. Todd helped build the first official version of the Deck of Brilliance that same year.
In 2025, nearly a decade later, I finally gave the deck the major upgrade and expansion it had long deserved.
The human brain is fundamentally lazy. Thinking is energy-intensive work, and solving problems burns a lot of fuel. So our brains default to patterns. When an approach works well in one situation and is rewarded with praise, it becomes the default way of thinking for every future problem.
So if you want to be truly adventurous, you have to prevent your brain from taking those familiar neural shortcuts and instead force it to take the long, scenic road.
That’s what the Deck of Brilliance is designed to do. The tools prompt your brain to think differently.
You’re invited to go down one path, then another, and another.
Imagine you’re a lioness in the Serengeti with hungry cubs to feed. You wouldn’t wander aimlessly hoping to bump into prey. Instead, you’d go where the prey are known to hang out- the watering holes.
These tools are watering holes for ideas. They’re places to hunt.
But you still have to do the hunting yourself.
Some people have suggested I turn the tools into a ChatGPT workflow. No thank you. If anyone out there wants to outsource their creativity, they’re welcome to. But I’m not in favour.
For most of us, coming up with winning ideas is a source of joy. Why would we want to give that up?
AI has raised the creative floor.
Anyone can now generate competent ideas, readable copy, and eye-catching visuals using AI.
Much like what happened with photography and videography after smartphones arrived, the barriers to entry in the world of communication have collapsed.
More people than ever now get to play with the toys.
But while AI can produce volume, it can’t tell which ideas are truly timely, bold, or culturally sharp.
It can’t apply nuance, show restraint, or anticipate human reactions.
As the novelty wears off, AI-generated output will become easier to spot and easier to dismiss.
That’s when the value of experienced creatives will rise.
While AI raises the floor, I still believe human experience defines the ceiling.
It’s true. Marketers today are stuck in systems that reward short-term wins. But real brand-building takes patience. It can’t be measured week to week.
You can’t escape the short-term trap entirely. So the key, in my view, is balance.
Marketers need to treat each campaign as part of a bigger story, not just a single push. Play the short game to keep the results coming, but keep investing in the long game so the brand still lives in people’s minds long after the campaign ends.
And creatives can do their part too, by pushing for ideas that feel bold enough to last.
When everyone else is optimising for the scroll, ask, will this still matter next year?
Unfortunately, we’re living in an era where most creative agencies are owned by holding companies whose real money comes from placing media, not from selling ideas.
In many agencies, ideas are given away for free.
That devalues creative people across the industry.
If you’re working at a big agency, don’t hold your breath waiting for them to give you more time to explore.
The truth is, creatives in this system are cows in a milking shed. And the bean counters couldn’t care less about pasture time.
In that system, compliance, not brilliance, becomes the ultimate virtue. Anyone defending their work with real passion will eventually be replaced by someone more compliant.
What’s the answer? I don’t know for sure.
What I do know is this. If you’re freelancing, protecting your mental health is your responsibility.
You have to adapt. Learn to be twice as productive in half the time. Present only the work you’re proud of.
And look outside the advertising world for your inspiration.
» You can connect with Juggi on LinkedIn here, or find the Deck of Brilliance here.
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