A pencil has a demanding audience. The parent wants it to survive the schoolbag. The child would rather it did something interesting. In 2004, Goral Ajmera was a senior art director at O&M Mumbai, working on animated commercials for Nataraj pencils. The assignment required both constituencies to agree on a small wooden object. Humour supplied the meeting place. It is a pleasing early credit for someone whose later work would give cricketers comic-book identities and turn a pack of cards into a pocket-sized celebration of Mumbai.
Advertising careers are often told through a procession of agency names. Ajmera has those names: Enterprise Nexus, Leo Burnett, O&M, JWT, Grey, and a credited Mumbai Indians collaboration at Lowe Lintas. But the objects make a more revealing route through her work. A pencil. A battery. A poster. A playing card. Each starts with something familiar enough to pass unnoticed, then asks for another look.
Today she is the founder and creative director of Brave, an independent agency based in Mumbai. Her professional history includes Cannes Gold Lions in successive years, 2013 and 2014. Her present portfolio moves between sport, cultural institutions, film, identity and merchandise. The scale changes; the question of how to give an idea a visible, memorable form remains.
The pencil, the parent and the punchline
The Nataraj team used 2D animation to make durability appealing to parents and children, with versions intended for several languages. Ajmera worked alongside Sumanto Chattopadhyay and Zenobia Pithawalla.
A product demonstration can establish a claim, but it must earn attention first. Animation gives a pencil a world beyond the stationery counter. Humour makes room for the child in an adult purchasing decision. Both audiences need a reason to care.
There is no need to imagine a precocious childhood sketchbook to account for Ajmera's training. She studied at Sophia Polytechnic from 1994 to 1999 and graduated with a gold medal. The sequence that follows is grounded in jobs and credited work. When Grey Mumbai appointed her senior creative director, Art, in June 2010, she already had more than ten years of experience.
At Grey, she reported to Malvika Mehra and Amit Akali. Her previous work included beauty, travel and magazine brands. A recognisable visual idea must belong to the particular assignment, rather than arrive wearing the same outfit every time.
Two sides of a battery
At Grey India, Ajmera helped create Duracell's Positive & Negative campaign. The product offered a built-in visual vocabulary: two poles, two signs, and a promise of endurance. The campaign connected battery performance with the thought that a good thing can have another side. It ran in newspapers and as posters in electronics stores, toy stores and supermarkets.
The One Show's 2014 design record credits her in art direction, design and executive creative direction, alongside collaborators including Mehra and Vishnu Srivatsav. The poster series received a Merit award. Those separate credits matter. An advertising image is a shared construction, involving the written idea, visual execution and the people responsible for making the finished work cohere.
A battery is an awkward leading actor. It has neither an expressive face nor much range of movement. Its usefulness is usually measured by how long you can forget about it. Positive & Negative found a story in the product's own structure. That is the attraction of this kind of design: the answer appears to have been sitting on the object all along.
Gold medal
Senior creative director, Art
Cannes Gold Lions
The festival honours give this part of her career a clear marker. Her larger body of work, however, cannot be compressed into a trophy count. Awards tell us that a particular piece travelled successfully through a judging process. The campaign itself lets us examine the more useful question: what did the creative team choose to make visible?
Mumbai, shuffled
Brave's limited-edition Mumbai Indians playing cards for the 2024 season gave supporters 52 illustrated cards. The details went beyond a player's place in the batting order, drawing on styles, tattoos, traditions, pets and personal quirks. Dario Genuardi is credited for illustrations, with Krishna Shukla as editor and Jean-Marie Rudent as animator. Ajmera's credit is founder and creative director.
A pack of cards imposes a rather entertaining discipline. The format is small, familiar and repetitive. Every card must belong to the deck; each also needs a reason to be there. Sports merchandising already offers plenty of ways to display allegiance. Cards add the possibility of holding, sorting, playing and keeping. A supporter can put the team on the table without requiring a stadium-sized table.
The next edition, Deck of Dreams 2025, turned towards the city itself. Its illustrated stories linked players with Mumbai pleasures and landmarks: chai, an ice gola at Juhu Beach, a rickshaw ride, vada pav. These are the campaign's depictions, miniature scenes built for the cards. The deck gathers a team's connection to its home into things that can fit in a hand.
There is a useful reversal here. A sports franchise can make a city into a logo. These cards give the city some of its mess, appetite and daily texture back. Mumbai is allowed to appear as a place where someone might stop for tea. The result offers a different kind of proximity from a scoreboard. A famous player becomes a character in a recognisable local scene.
Matchworks, another Mumbai Indians project, took street-cricket expressions into matchbox-style illustration and T-shirts sold at college festival pop-ups. Ajmera is credited alongside illustrator Lokesh Karekar of Locopopo. A phrase such as Aada Tircha, describing an unorthodox shot, becomes part of the visual material. The reference belongs to the people who already use it.
That choice gives the design an audience with its own expertise. You do not have to explain every expression to everyone in order for a local audience to enjoy recognising itself. Slang has rhythm and character before a designer touches it. The opportunity is to preserve those qualities while giving them another surface to inhabit. Here, the surface was clothing, and the vocabulary came from cricket played around the city.
A yorker gets a comic-book name
The 2024 Mumbai Indians Superhero Verse used 25 posters to give players illustrated alter egos. Jasprit Bumrah became the Toe Crusher; Ishan Kishan appeared as the Pocket Dynamo. The campaign drew on retro comic-book visuals, with emphatic colour, typography and exaggerated action. Its credits include Locopopo, Sportacular, typographer Brijesh Parmar and a team of illustrators.
Calling a bowler the Toe Crusher is a joke with a technical basis. It turns a recognisable sporting skill into the kind of title a comic-book character might carry. The audience brings knowledge of the game; the image rewards it. Comic books also provide permission to exaggerate. A poster can freeze the drama of a delivery in a way a plain player photograph cannot.
Placed beside the cards and Matchworks, the project shows several routes into the same fan culture. One uses personality, one uses the city, one uses the language of local cricket, and one uses fantasy. A creative director's contribution includes choosing which route suits the object and gathering the collaborators who can make that choice convincing.
From a fan's pocket to a cultural centre
For the Nita Mukesh Ambani Cultural Centre launch, Brave worked around Culture at the Centre. The campaign extended across national newspaper advertisements, outdoor placements, film and digital media. Architecture, performers and the stage became parts of a coordinated visual system. Ajmera is credited as founder and creative director, with Krishna Shukla as editor.
A cultural centre presents another design problem: many disciplines need to share one public identity. An image of a building alone cannot convey everything that might happen inside it. The campaign's organising phrase gave its different subjects a common point of return. Compared with the intimacy of a playing card, the scale is expansive. Both require the visual parts to recognise one another.
Brave's portfolio also includes work for India House at the Paris Olympics in 2024, RISE Worldwide and Burger King. The range is evident without pretending that every assignment follows one formula. Campaigns need room to change their accent. The person directing them must be able to change the cast, the medium and the level of spectacle with the brief.
Who can afford the first assignment?
In an April 2026 essay on internships, Ajmera argues for paying young creatives. Her concern is access: unpaid work limits entry to people who can afford it, while meaningful training needs structure, mentorship and respect. She also points out that agencies compete with other routes into creative employment, including content platforms and in-house teams.
The argument adds a concrete obligation to the agency's name. An invitation to be courageous means less if the price of entry excludes someone. For a profession built on finding fresh perspectives, the question of who gets through the door belongs alongside the question of which idea gets made. A first assignment should offer more than a famous name on a future résumé.
Before the desk
Ajmera spends roughly fifteen minutes each morning tending her plants. Travel supplies another form of observation: she has described the Sea Organ in Zadar, Croatia, as a reminder of what a simple idea can do. In the studio, she values shared ownership of ideas and the laughter between deadlines.
“you're never too small to be Brave.”
Goral Ajmera
It is a compact belief for a founder whose work often gives small objects substantial jobs. A card carries a city. A pencil carries a joke. A battery supplies two sides of a story. There is pleasure in that economy, and a practical challenge in repeating it across a working life. The next assignment will still need its own answer. Somewhere between the familiar object and the second look, there is room to begin.