Ad Age Contest

About the Project

Every year, Ad Age launches a competition for young creatives to create the cover for its magazine, this year’s briefing was to combine creativity with Dove’s #ShowUs project and Getty Images that is the largest collection of stock images that the aim is to shatter beauty stereotypes by showing individuals as they are.

Ad Age X Embroidery of Tibaldinho

Imagine a cover that brings culture/art together with creativity.

That is how this project was born. Starting from the inspiration of #ShowUs photographs, I drew a face of a woman with many features on each side, assuming herself different and beautiful in her own way, now we live in a time when everything is too perfect and what makes us human is exactly this imperfect side. Creativity has no barriers, no age, and taking on a secular art that are the Embroidery of Tibaldinho, a piece of handicraft that is cultural and immaterial heritage, in which my grandmother that is 80 years old, a woman who proves that creativity has no age and a master in this art, we made a team, in which she transported my drawing to the embroidery, giving it life and joining art, culture and creativity.

A piece of art that intersects with creativity in a unique way, giving texture and shape to the design created by me, embroidered by an 80 year old woman, in one of the smallest villages in Portugal, a cover that becomes a piece of craftsmanship, in fact creativity has no limits and that is the beauty of it.

The Embroidery of Tibaldinho

Tibaldinho (a really small village in the Center of Portugal) Embroidery is a Portuguese handicraft with 200 years of history and is characterized by being embroidered in white, on white cloth, with a decorative grammar that distinguishes it, gaining its own genuineness and identity.

For its patrimonial and symbolic value is considered a unique embroidery, constituting an important part of the cultural and immaterial heritage of Portugal, a symbol of identity and pride of the community of the small village of Tibaldinho.

Creative Process

For some time I wanted to do a project that brought together a contemporary design to the minimalist traces of the art of Tibaldinho Embroidery, I was always enthusiastic to draw something new for this embroidery, also because I was born in the village from where is the embroidery and all my life I lived with them around me.

And of course, my biggest inspiration, my grandmother which is one of the great masters of this craft. I started by seeing the images of the project #ShowUs and I gained some inspiration for the drawing. From there, I finished the drawing, always accompanied with the stitch book of Tibaldinho Embroidery, making all the traces of the drawing of the face of the woman have the characteristic points and the embroidery technique.

The drawing was then passed to the cloth by my mother, and then my 80-year-old grandmother did the embroidery with the stitches I chose, I talked to her, she advised me to change one or another point so things would look better. It was a very interesting process, we made a peculiar but very beautiful team. During the whole project, what excited me the most was the process itself, thinking of joining a secular art with a contemporary design, and making a partnership with my grandmother.

It was very beautiful, to realize that creativity has no limits nor age to be creative.

The final cover