Interview with Tipz

What motivates me is the moment a business problem becomes visible and solvable. A brand arrives with a pain, sometimes in the name, sometimes on the shelf, sometimes in the fact that nobody understands what it sells. Design is where that pain gets resolved in a way people can see in two seconds, before reading a single word.

I did not become a designer. I became someone who leads design because writing alone stopped being enough to make the argument. A line can be brilliant and still lose to a package that looks cheap. At some point you understand that the whole thing has to work together or none of it works.

I chose advertising very early, as a child, and design came as a consequence of that choice. Once you are responsible for a brand from end to end, you cannot stop at the words. You have to have an opinion about the mark, the colour, the material, the shelf. Nobody forced me. The work simply expanded until it included design, and I was glad to follow it there.

I do not have a category I want more of. Drink, food, service, industry, it makes no difference to me. What attracts me is any challenging project with a real communication pain, whether that pain sits in the brand itself or in the packaging.

Café Guardião is a good example. The product was excellent and the packaging was not saying so. We redesigned it and the brand doubled its sales. That is the kind of problem I want, regardless of the sector: something genuinely good that has no vocabulary to explain itself.

I would not use that word about myself, so take this cheaply. But if I had to say something useful: build a process and build repertoire, in that order and then permanently.

Most young designers collect references. That is not repertoire, it is a mood board. Repertoire is what you accumulate by consuming everything, architecture, film, advertising, furniture, the design of a chair, and then being able to reach for the right thing at the right moment without copying it. The market is full of people who can reproduce what already won last year. It is short on people who can look at a business in trouble and see the shape of the answer.

A good designer has a well defined creative process and real repertoire. Those two things are not talent, they are construction, and they are what separate someone who delivers consistently from someone who occasionally gets lucky.

Beyond that, the great ones notice when the brief is asking the wrong question and say so before starting. That takes a kind of courage that has nothing to do with craft.

Two tests. First, could this belong to any other brand? If yes, it is decoration. Second, did anything change because of it, in sales, in perception, in the way the market treats the company?

In my field, design has to be good and beautiful at the same time, because it has to convert. There is no point in something impeccable that nobody wants to pick up, and no point in something attractive that says nothing about the product. Both conditions or it failed.

At first it can look expensive. That is the objection every client has, spoken or not. But design is the cheapest tool a company has, and the price on the proposal is the least relevant number in the conversation.

With Café Guardião, we redesigned the packaging and the brand doubled its sales. No new factory, no discount, no additional media investment. Just a better argument on the shelf.

Most companies spend enormous sums buying attention and very little making the thing worth the attention they bought. That is backwards. The package is working every second the product is on the shelf, and it costs a fraction of a campaign. When you put what design brings in sales next to what it costs, the investment stops being a relevant part of the discussion.

I would design for people who need to push their business forward and cannot afford it. Small businesses whose owners know their product is good and have no way to make anyone else see it.

I did something close to this during the pandemic, almost as a pilot, helping businesses that were in real trouble. It worked, and it stayed with me. What I never had was the time or the structure to make it recurring. If I could scale that into something continuous rather than occasional, that is where I would put my free time, because design applied to someone who genuinely needs it produces a change out of all proportion to the cost. For a large company, good design is an advantage. For a small one, it can be the difference between staying open and closing.

I do not think there is such a thing as a dream project. There are projects that sustain dreams, whether that is my own dream as a company or the result our work produces for someone else's business. That distinction matters to me, because chasing a dream project is a good way to undervalue the ones actually in front of you.

That said, one thing came to mind just now. In Brazil, I would love to build a football club from nothing. The name, the crest, the shirt, the whole visual identity. Football in Brazil is not a category, it is an emotional inheritance, and designing something people would tattoo on themselves and pass down to their children is a completely different responsibility from designing something they buy. That would be a genuinely different experience, and it would mark me.

There is no secret. There is process, repertoire and hard work.

A good concept comes from process: briefing, immersion, understanding the business before anyone draws anything. Quality is the consequence of that, not the starting point. People look for a trick because a trick would be faster. There is no faster.

I do not have specific masters. I prefer to drink from every source I can reach.

Design is in everything: in architecture, in a chair, in advertising, in absolutely everything a human being can make. If you only look at design made by designers, you end up in a closed loop, producing variations of each other. Wide references build wide repertoire, and repertoire is what you actually use when the problem arrives.

The timeless ones. The pieces that need nothing added to be what they are, only exactly what they must be. Nothing decorative, nothing there to impress a jury.

And they still have to be attractive to the eye. In my field you never forget that design has to be good and beautiful in order to convert. Timelessness without appeal is an exercise. Appeal without substance is packaging in the worst sense of the word.

I would rather not name a single project. The world of coffee has given me the most relevant design work of my career, so I would say coffee as a whole is my best project.

It is a category with a real problem in Brazil, a product of genuine quality that the market had been trained to treat as ordinary. Working there repeatedly, across brands and lines, taught me more than any single piece. And it produced results, including the packaging work that doubled a brand's sales.

Work. Everything came to me naturally once I believed in what I was doing and kept looking for ways to learn, whether in courses or on the job itself.

I would add one thing: consume outside your field. I have lived in Rio de Janeiro, Salvador, Switzerland, São Paulo and Vitória, and each place left something. Moving through different worlds gives you more usable material than any tutorial.

I have no idea. I decided to work in advertising as a child, around ten years old, and I never had a second plan. Leading design projects came later as a natural extension of that. If you take both away, I honestly do not know what would be left.

Design is everything we see. In my business, it is turning products and brands into desire.

My family. My father, my wife, my grandmother. I would not have made it even halfway without them. Everything else, the agencies, the partnerships, the awards, came after and rests on that.

Having moved through very different worlds. I was born in Rio de Janeiro, raised in Salvador from the age of five, went back to Rio for a year as a child, lived briefly in Switzerland at sixteen, returned to Salvador, worked in São Paulo from 2010, and moved to Vitória in 2015. Each of those places has a different rhythm, a different visual culture, a different idea of what is normal.

That gave me repertoire, and it did so while I already knew I wanted to work in creative. I was consuming everything with a purpose from very early on, which is different from consuming a lot by accident.

The other thing was partnership. Working alongside Mateus Montenegro since 2010 taught me how design thinking actually happens, in the argument between two people who want the same result and disagree about the route.

The hardest one was consolidating my own agency, with my principles and my philosophy of work intact.

Start with the problem, not the mood board. Show the business situation, show the decision that was made, then show the design as the consequence of that decision.

Clients do not buy aesthetics. They buy the confidence that you understood their trouble. A presentation that opens with references is telling the client you started from taste, and taste is the easiest thing in the world to disagree with.

Whatever comes next. I do not select projects by how attractive they look; every one of them matters and every one of them is a different challenge.

In business terms, the answer is clearer: the international expansion of TiPZ is what will occupy the coming years. We already work with clients in the United States, Canada and Mexico, and we are opening a base in Italy. Doing consistently high level work across those markets, from a Brazilian agency, is the hardest thing on my list.

To do relevant, high level work anywhere in the world, whether the project is local or global. The scale does not change the standard. The work has to be the best, always, regardless of the size of the client or the size of the city it comes from.

Honesty, I hope. The most valuable thing I can offer a client is telling them when the thing they asked for will not work, and why. Everything else they can buy somewhere else, often cheaper.

Design can change a lot of lives. It carries self esteem, first of all: when a product is presented with real care, the people who make it start to see themselves differently.

And it can change a business completely. When it changes a business, it changes lives, whether that is one life or thousands. That is not an abstraction, it is what happens when sales double and a company has to hire, expand, produce more. Design is one of the few disciplines where an aesthetic decision shows up in someone's income.

Always several things at once: campaigns, the day to day clients of the agency, design projects at different stages. Every day and every week is a different challenge, and that variety is the part I would not trade.

Café Guardião doubled the brand's sales and moved it to another level, so that one is easy to point at.

But if I am honest, the projects that satisfy me most are all the ones that kept me creatively relevant across all these years. Doing one very good piece of work and reaching a Cannes shortlist is extremely hard. Staying relevant, creating work that matters year after year, is a thousand times harder. Nobody gives you a trophy for that and it is the thing I am actually proud of.

Less referencing, more thinking. Our industry has built an efficient machine for recycling what already won last year. It produces competent work and almost no surprise.

I would like to see the assumption die that serious work only comes from a handful of cities. Talent is already distributed everywhere. What is not distributed is the belief that it counts.

Toward a split. Execution is becoming abundant and cheap, so the value migrates to judgement, to knowing which of a thousand possible answers is the right one for this specific business.

Designers who compete on production will struggle. Designers who compete on decisions will not. That is why process and repertoire matter more now than they did ten years ago, not less.

A packaging project, from first contact to the shelf, can take months or more than a year. The design itself is a small part of that. Most of the time goes into understanding the business, aligning the decision with the client, and the reality of production, what the printer can actually deliver within cost.

With the briefing and the immersion. Where will this be seen, next to what, and what does the company need to happen commercially. Only after that, the concept.

Starting from aesthetics is how you end up with something beautiful that solves nothing. I write the idea in one sentence before anyone draws anything. If the sentence is weak, no amount of craft will save it.

Be creative with what you have, from wherever you are.

Trends set most designs, which is exactly the problem. Following a trend is a way of outsourcing the decision, and it always feels safe at the moment you do it.

The few projects that set anything are made by people who were not paying much attention to what everyone else was doing. That is also why the timeless work survives: it was never trying to belong to a year.

It removes the excuses. Anything can be visualized now, quickly and cheaply, which means the only remaining scarcity is knowing what is worth visualizing.

Technology has made craft abundant and judgement expensive. We use it early, to explore directions fast, and then the hard part starts, which is the same hard part as always: deciding.

The usual Adobe tools for production, generative AI for exploring directions quickly in the early phase, and a notebook for the sentence that has to exist before all of it.

In packaging they are the argument, not the finish. Material is where a promise becomes physically credible or falls apart. You can write premium on a package all you like; if it feels cheap in the hand, the buyer has already decided.

Colour and material are also where budget lives. A large part of the craft in this work is achieving perceived quality within a real production constraint, and that is a decision, not a taste.

What changed for the client. Almost nobody asks. They ask about the typeface.

Two questions in sequence. What did they manage to get approved, and who had to be convinced to let them. The best work almost always survived an argument that it could easily have lost.

I believe in it because I depend on it. My best work has always come from two people arguing until neither is entirely comfortable. Mateus Montenegro has been that partner since 2010, from our first days as a creative duo in São Paulo through the packaging we brought to this award.

The people I have worked with, and the people who have nothing to do with design at all. That is the beauty of it. Some of the most useful things I know about how a product should look came from someone who had never opened a design program in their life and simply told me what they saw.

I read constantly and I resist naming a single canon, for the same reason I do not have single masters. But the ones that shaped how I think about the commercial side are Ogilvy on Advertising for discipline, How Brands Grow by Byron Sharp for demolishing comfortable assumptions, Thinking, Fast and Slow by Kahneman and Descartes' Error by Damásio for explaining the second in which a decision is actually made, Cialdini for persuasion and Lindstrom for the senses.

Almost none of them are design books. That is deliberate.

By working. Everything comes naturally if you believe in what you do and keep looking to learn, whether in courses or in the job itself. There was no shortcut and no single moment where it clicked. It was years of projects, and the partnership with Mateus, and paying attention.

My grandmother. And all the people I love and cannot meet anymore.

I am not famous, which spares me the difficulty. Awards matter to me for one specific reason: they change which conversations you get invited into.

A Cannes shortlist in 2017, the A' Design Awards this year, and every meaningful award before them did the same thing. They let you show yourself as relevant to the world from wherever you happen to be. For an agency that is not based in one of the cities the industry pays attention to, that is not a vanity, it is access.

I should confess something before answering: I am terrible at this kind of question. I am not a person of one favourite anything. Ask me my favourite film and I freeze. I have no favourite colour and no favourite brand, and I do not think that is modesty, I think it is how I am built. Wide taste is the same instinct that makes me useful at work.

What I can give you: food, four answers rather than one, feijoada, churrasco, Japanese and Italian. Season, summer.

The work itself motivates me. It always has. I have never needed a technique for that.

The real problem is everything around it that demotivates: the meetings that go nowhere, the good idea killed for the wrong reason, the client who asked for courage and then bought safety. Protecting the work from all of that is most of the job.

It was obvious it would be something to do with creativity. By around ten years old I was already talking about working in advertising. Design specifically was not obvious at all; that came later, through the work.

About the near future, I have an opinion. Execution is becoming abundant and almost free, which means the scarce thing is no longer the ability to make something, it is knowing what deserves to be made. I think that applies well beyond design. We are heading into a period with an enormous volume of competent, indistinguishable output, and the people who can decide, edit and take responsibility for a point of view will matter more than the people who can produce.

As for a thousand years from now, the way things are going, a hundred is already hard to predict, including whether the world will still be standing.

Two things.

The first is about how I work. I am not the person who draws. I am the person who decides what the drawing has to accomplish. My part happens before and around the design: the briefing, the immersion, the concept, the argument that has to hold before anyone opens a file. Then I work alongside people who are far better than me at making it real, and I stay in the room while they do it. I say this because young people often think there is only one way into this work. There is not. Mine was through advertising, through writing, through learning to ask what a brand is actually trying to solve.

The second is more personal. I am more than the work. My design is not what I am, it is what has to be well made. I take the craft extremely seriously and I do not confuse it with my identity. That is the reason I can look at something I made and ask honestly whether it is doing its job, which is much harder when you believe the work is you.

The Café Guardião packaging recognised here came out of exactly that: a decision about what the brand needed, made long before anything was drawn.

Design is the art of making anything unforgettable. That is a definition I developed over years of practice, and it captures something I genuinely believe: that good design is not primarily about aesthetics. It is about anchoring meaning. It is the transformation of an idea into something that can be felt, touched, seen, experienced, without the need for explanation. In packaging design specifically, I see design as the last argument a brand makes before a consumer decides. It is communication compressed into form, material, and gesture.

Packaging with conceptual depth. There is something uniquely satisfying about designing an object that communicates before it is opened, where every surface decision, every material choice, every structural detail serves the narrative. Beyond packaging, I also find great meaning in work that carries cultural or social weight: a campaign film that travels the world, a brand identity built for a cooperative that sustains thousands of families. The work I love most is the kind where concept and execution are inseparable.

It is difficult to choose a single piece, but if I were to point to a trajectory, it begins with Café Tunico. That was the first major packaging project I directed, and it established a way of thinking that extended naturally into Café Soul, from the same company, with an even more refined and awarded visual language. Then came Guardião Excelência, for Cooabriel, which represents a different level of structure and intent. It was a project built in a more linear way. The result was packaging that grew in revenue without any campaign behind it, driven purely by the strength of the design. These three projects form, for me, a clear line of evolution about what packaging design can do when it is taken seriously as a strategic tool.

In the packaging space, the first major work I directed was for Café Tunico, a project that itself went on to win recognition at the A' Design Award. That project was followed by the Café Soul packaging, for the same company, which became one of our most awarded pieces. These early packaging projects established the way I approach the category: concept first, execution as a consequence of the idea.

When infinite possibilities meet responsibility. The most creative moments are not when I have total freedom. They are when the brief has purpose. That is why all the work done beforehand, as we do at Tipz, matters so much. A specific cultural context is already half the answer. Creativity flows more naturally when the repertoire about the product is deep enough: after immersion, after research, after understanding what is truly at stake for the client and their audience.

Conceptual coherence above all. I need to be able to explain why every visual decision was made, not just what it looks like, but what it means and what it does. From there, the hierarchy of attention: what does the eye land on first, and does that serve the brand's most important message? And finally, sensory integrity: the way the object feels, sounds when handled, and presents itself in context.

A restlessness. An inexhaustible search for references and techniques. There is always a sense of dissatisfaction driving the process, the feeling that the idea is not yet right, that the current version is a bridge toward something better. The pursuit of the visual insight that will make everything click, the change of direction even when everything seems finished. And then comes the moment when it all falls perfectly into place: when the set of ideas becomes ideal, as if it could not have been any other way.

Validation and responsibility simultaneously. When the Guardião Excelência packaging launched and the cooperative's revenue grew, without any advertising investment, that felt like real proof. Not just that the design was beautiful, but that it worked. That it communicated something to the person standing in front of a shelf that made them choose this product. That feeling of design doing its actual job is the most satisfying thing I know professionally.

Results. I have seen beautiful packaging that did not sell and modest-looking packaging that dominated its category. Success is when the design does what it was supposed to do: whether that is increasing revenue, changing perception, justifying a premium price, or making a brand feel like it belongs somewhere it never belonged before. The Guardião Excelência project is a clear example: a packaging redesign that drove revenue growth for a cooperative sustaining thousands of families, without a single campaign behind it.

Whether it has an idea. A design without a concept behind it may be competent, even beautiful, but it is decorative. I look for the decision that could only have been made for this specific brief, the thing that is not interchangeable with a hundred other designs in the same category. After that, I look at whether it is coherent: does every element reinforce the same intent, or are there contradictions that dilute the message?

To not be neutral. Every design decision, choice of material, scale of production, cultural reference, has consequences beyond the object itself. In our work with Cooabriel, the packaging was not just about aesthetics; it was about family production. The design had a direct impact on the brand that wraps that entire concept. That is a responsibility I take seriously, and I think it should be present in every brief, not just the ones with explicit social purpose.

Design is becoming less of a service and more of a strategic argument. Brands are beginning to understand that design is not the final step of a process: it is a way of thinking that should be present from the beginning. At the same time, the tools are democratizing rapidly, which raises the bar for those who work with concept. If anyone can produce something that looks good, the differentiator becomes creating something extraordinary, something that stands out on the shelf in a market as competitive as Brazil and the world.

My work does not live primarily in exhibition spaces: it lives on shelves, in stores, in the hands of consumers. The A' Design Award recognition represents the most recent moment of formal presentation, and that context feels appropriate for work that is ultimately meant to function in the world rather than be observed within it.

Repertoire is the raw material of creativity, everything you live through matters. That is something I believe deeply. I actively seek diverse sources, regardless of my personal taste. Having lived in different cities and even outside Brazil helps, but what you consume and how you consume it, whether music, television, film, books, or even the history of design and advertising, makes all the difference. From Alexey Brodovitch, who transformed layout into sensory experience, to Paul Rand, who proved that simplicity and concept are the same thing, to David Ogilvy, who understood that a great idea must be sellable before it can be admirable. Distinct universes, but ones that together form a more complete vision of what design can be. For the Guardião Excelência project, the spark was a name: São Gabriel da Palha, the city where the cooperative is based. Saint Gabriel is an archangel, a guardian. From that single observation, a whole system of meaning unfolded: the brand name, the wing motif, the die-cut that turns opening the package into a gesture of protection. That is the kind of inspiration I look for: the detail that already contains the whole idea.

It is important to make clear that I do not execute design myself; I lead diverse projects in the field. That said, I believe strongly in conceptually driven minimalism. I am drawn to work where the idea does the visual work, where a single well-chosen form or gesture communicates more than an accumulation of elements. I tend toward work with a strong typographic sensibility, controlled material contrast, and structure that carries meaning. The Guardião Excelência packaging is a good example: the most distinctive feature is a die-cut in the shape of a wing. One decision, one concept, one coherent system. That restraint is deliberate.

I currently live in Vitória, Espírito Santo. Although I was born in Rio de Janeiro, I grew up in Salvador, Bahia, and developed professionally in São Paulo. Through that path, I was able to see up close something that is widely acknowledged: Brazil's cultural diversity is immense. We are a continental country with genuine creative resources. The indigenous, African, and European references, the way Brazilian music, food, and ritual carry strong and plural meanings, are an extraordinary foundation. The challenge lies precisely in that contradiction. Despite such a rich culture, there is a historical erasure of these origins and a visual overvaluation of what comes from outside. But I believe we are moving in the right direction to change that. There is still a long way to go, but things have already improved considerably.

We begin with immersion. Before any creative decision is made, we invest in understanding the business, the product, the territory, and the people involved. The Guardião Excelência project required deep research into the cooperative's history, the conilon coffee category, and the cultural and geographic identity of São Gabriel da Palha. Only from that accumulated understanding does the creative direction become possible. After immersion and planning, the creative team, in this case myself and designer Mateus Montenegro, develops concepts that go through rounds of testing and refinement until we reach something that is both strong in idea and viable in execution.

It starts with a proper briefing, followed by immersion and extensive research. We map the brand, the category, the competitor landscape, and the cultural references that are relevant to the project. That research is broad and goes deep: it includes design references, exploration of material and finishing possibilities, and in-person market research, with visits to supermarket shelves to understand how the product behaves in the real purchase environment, side by side with its competitors. Then the creative process begins: intense brainstorming, concept development, rounds of exploration and testing. On packaging projects, my collaboration with Mateus Montenegro is close and constant. We develop concepts together, test them against the brief, and challenge each other until the idea is strong enough to stand on its own. The final phase is always about refinement and coherence: removing what is not necessary, sharpening what remains.

It starts with a proper briefing, followed by immersion and extensive research. We map the brand, the category, the competitor landscape, and the cultural references that are relevant to the project. That research is broad and goes deep: it includes design references, exploration of material and finishing possibilities, and in-person market research, with visits to supermarket shelves to understand how the product behaves in the real purchase environment, side by side with its competitors. Then the creative process begins: intense brainstorming, concept development, rounds of exploration and testing. On packaging projects, my collaboration with Mateus Montenegro is close and constant. We develop concepts together, test them against the brief, and challenge each other until the idea is strong enough to stand on its own. The final phase is always about refinement and coherence: removing what is not necessary, sharpening what remains.

Accumulate as much repertoire as you can. Travel if you can. Read everything, not just design books, but history, literature, and a wide range of subjects. Listen to music from cultures you do not know. Try different foods. Every experience you have is raw material for future ideas, even if you cannot see the connection at the time. Learn to separate the quality of an idea from the quality of its execution. Both matter, but they are different skills. And build a practice of hammering the idea. Use every bit of the time you have. The first idea is almost never the right one. The discipline is in continuing past it.

Every element must earn its place. If you cannot explain why something is there, why that color, why that form, why that texture, it should not be there. Design is not the addition of elements; it is the discipline of removing what is not necessary until only the idea remains.

Conceptual clarity: the ability to identify the single most important thing a design needs to communicate and to organize everything around it. Cultural literacy: knowing enough about history, art, and everyday life to make references that resonate. And the capacity to receive criticism without ego, because design is tested in the real world, and the real world does not care about your intentions.

By protecting the thinking phase. The biggest time losses in creative work come from starting execution before the concept is clear, and then having to redo everything when the idea shifts. We invest more time than most in the briefing and immersion phases, which makes the execution phase faster and more focused. Clarity of intent is the most efficient time management tool I know.

There is no fixed timeframe. For a packaging project with the depth of the Guardião Excelência line, the process, from initial immersion through final production approval, generally takes a few months. The early phase is the most variable: some ideas arrive quickly, others require many rounds before they are right. Depending on the packaging material, finding the right supplier and managing lead times can also take considerable time. The most important thing in a project like this is not to skip steps.

Without wanting to sound like a cliché, there is no way to single out one job. It is a combination of decisions that put you in the right place at the right time. Every stage of life, every job matters. From the smallest to the largest.

Today at Tipz we work with Cooabriel, the world's largest company in its sector. Bimbo, a global company. Grupo Geofin, with companies such as DDChem, Feli, Nebrax and N_stry, Grupo Águia Branca, Vix Logística, among others. In total we have more than 30 clients.

Campaigns and designs that carry meaning. Communicating something that stays. Work that people connect with, consume, or feel something from. The Guardião Excelência project is that kind of work: the opening gesture of the package is the archangel's wing protecting what is inside. That is not decoration. That is design thinking expressed through structure.

Continuing to expand Tipz's national and international reach, deepening the conceptual quality and results of our work.

Always as a team, not least because I do not execute the design myself. Even if I did, the work is much larger than that: it starts in client services, moves through planning, execution, and production. It takes many hands to bring a project to life. Including the support and trust of the client.

At Tipz we always have several projects running simultaneously, both advertising campaigns and design. Unfortunately I cannot yet talk about the ones currently in progress, but it is gratifying to know the work never stops.

Through Tipz, our agency based in Vitória, Espírito Santo, Brazil. We are open to national and international inquiries for packaging design, brand identity, on and off campaigns, as well as the implementation of strategic planning work within companies.

One thing I would add is the importance of proximity to the client's reality. The Café Guardião project was not created from a distance; it was built from an understanding of what that cooperative represents for thousands of families, for the city, and for the state. Good design requires empathy, not just craft. The packaging did not start with a color palette or a typeface, but with a question: what is this product protecting, and what is its purpose?