Dubai's Waggish Launches a 40-Card Deck for Creative Block

Creativity Fuel is a new deck of 40 timed creative challenges by Raghad Murad, founder of Waggish, a Dubai design brand that makes stickers, games, stationery and other products out of Arabic wordplay and everyday Emirati and Gulf humour.

Launched in August 2026, the deck takes the exercises Murad uses herself in her own design practice when she runs out of ideas and turns them into prompts for other artists, designers or anyone feeling creatively stuck.

The way it works is that you pick a card and it gives you something to make, redesign, imagine or experiment with, along with a time limit to get it done. In Murad's own attempts, those prompts have produced fictional product designs including Anti Brain Rot Spray and an insecticide for "electronic flies", the Arabic term for troll or bot accounts that swarm social media.

"Creative ideas don't usually strike when you're sitting around waiting for them," Murad tells SceneNowUAE. "They tend to come in the middle of action, or while you're actively trying to become inspired."

For Murad, getting unstuck begins by doing something, anything.

"You have to put yourself in the path of ideas in order to catch one, and that is the whole concept behind Creativity Fuel," she says. "The person using the prompts might not do exactly what is written, but they may still be inspired to create something entirely their own."

The same happened while she was developing the deck. "While writing the prompts, I ended up inspiring myself to create more artworks that I later shared on social media. It really is a beautiful loop."

Each challenge has a time limit, pushing users to start making before they have time to overthink the idea. "It is much more straightforward to encourage someone to spend just one hour designing something than to say, 'Here's an idea you can spend the next week working on,'" she says.

But the hour does not have to be the end of it. "I'm sure they may end up spending more than that one hour, but once the wheels are turning, we've already done our job."

For example, one prompt asks users to imagine a useful but fictional product. Murad's own design ideas, found on the website, include Anti Brain Rot Spray. "I love designing products that reference existing products, but with a twist," she says. "These are often the products that get comments like, 'Oh, I need 1,000 boxes of these.' Anti Brain Rot Spray came from seeing the Arabic phrase تعفن دماغي written out for the first time. I immediately loved how literal it felt: if something is rotting, how do you get rid of it? You clean it up." She also imagined an insecticide spray for "electronic flies", with trolls and bot accounts being pests you could simply spray away.

Murad started Waggish as a university student in 2020 because the Arabic design products she encountered rarely felt like they were made for her.

"Arabic design felt so out of reach," she says. "It was often expensive and heavily focused on classic typography, or it went in the complete opposite direction and felt basic and repetitive. We wanted to create Arabic designs that were just as fun as the international designs we saw, at a similarly affordable price."

Arabic, for Murad, was never supposed to automatically make a product serious or traditional. "We didn't see Arabic in our designs as a marker of a serious or overly mature look, but rather as a tool to create designs that hit closer to home and feel more relatable to our community."

Her brand started from stickers and gradually moved to games, stationery, clothes and objects. An idea can come up even when she is talking with someone.

"I make a conscious effort to stay observant and open to receiving ideas," she says. "I love looking around, and it often feels like I'm scribbling notes in my mind while I'm walking, scrolling online, or talking with loved ones."

There are also rules for what makes it past those mental notes and into the Waggish catalogue.

"It has to carry a positive or funny message, avoid offending or insulting anyone, and be something that can be represented visually in a smart and engaging way."

Other products reference things already familiar across Arab households. Coffee cups turned stickers and pop sockets, sunflower seeds made into coin purses, and more have all found their way into Waggish's work.

Creativity Fuel is available through Waggish's online shop for AED 50 (695 EGP).