Thiago Costa
Designer and co-founder of Fey, the investing app Wealthsimple acquired in August 2025.
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Their wordsthe good thing about this is that when you have this beauty as a guiding principle you are forced to simplify you're forced to make something that most people would understand
↗Thiago Costa - Cultivating taste as a designeryoutube.com 1st of 26 in this recording
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Their wordsif you pay $2,000 a month to get a Bloomberg terminal you'll see that there is a lot of data but the user has to do the work to understand this data so we saw an opportunity with education how do you make your customer understand this data better but without telling them what to do AI is really good at that because AI is good at interpreting data
↗Thiago Costa - Cultivating taste as a designeryoutube.com 2nd of 26 in this recording
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Their wordsnot having a deadline is a blessing and a curse because you can Linger on this go post of perfection that keeps moving and then never ship which is dangerous
↗Thiago Costa - Cultivating taste as a designeryoutube.com 3rd of 26 in this recording
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Their wordsbeing a good designer is to say no to most of the ideas that you have and yes so the ones that could work within the context of your product
↗Thiago Costa - Cultivating taste as a designeryoutube.com 4th of 26 in this recording
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Their wordseven like when we get feedback from customers the feedback on a surface is really good like when you read it like that makes a lot of sense and then you start applying this to your product and it just it just crumbles everything it makes no sense within the context of how the product works right now it's very easy to fall into the Trap of feedback and good ideas uh and it's very hard for you to say no to a good idea for the betterment of the product long term
↗Thiago Costa - Cultivating taste as a designeryoutube.com 5th of 26 in this recording
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Their wordsvalidating your old work through your new work is how you improve as a designer
↗Thiago Costa - Cultivating taste as a designeryoutube.com 6th of 26 in this recording
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Their wordsdesign is at this weird intersection between Art and Science and that part of redesigning and experimenting is the art side of it I think so you're always you're not really thinking about data right now you're not really thinking about your customers you're thinking about making something that looks really good
↗Thiago Costa - Cultivating taste as a designeryoutube.com 7th of 26 in this recording
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Their wordsthere's a lot you can learn from art it was the original UI so there's so many techniques that evolved for thousands of years that make art such a good reference and it kind of pisses me off that a lot of designers don't don't leverage this
↗Thiago Costa - Cultivating taste as a designeryoutube.com 8th of 26 in this recording
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Their wordsI I know personally friends of mine designers that don't really care about movies don't really care about art don't really care about music and they don't you know like go out and try to be curious and observe everything everything outside UI and apps have something to teach you
↗Thiago Costa - Cultivating taste as a designeryoutube.com 9th of 26 in this recording
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Their wordswe try to avoid taking inspiration from UI because UI is basically taking inspiration from the world from nature uh in general so you're kind of like distilling down the the steps of inspiration you're breaking down the idea so go to the source directly
↗Thiago Costa - Cultivating taste as a designeryoutube.com 10th of 26 in this recording
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Their wordsif you're making something that is elevated and there's a shadow there has to be a light somewhere so you have to add the you know like the outline to make it look like the light is coming from there makes everything look more grounded and more realistic because just adding Shadow on a flat button doesn't really visually make sense
↗Thiago Costa - Cultivating taste as a designeryoutube.com 11th of 26 in this recording
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Their wordscar vaju is the master I I talk about this all the time it's like the master of light so he always uses a light source even if it's obscure you don't know where the light source is from when you're actually you know like not analyzing everything but it creates this depth and Shadow and copy that like you can put one of his paintings next to your UI and then start to copying even copy like the light source
↗Thiago Costa - Cultivating taste as a designeryoutube.com 12th of 26 in this recording
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Their wordsmaybe the object that you're elevating is darker than the background so the rule doesn't really make sense in the real world uh you can have uh a darker keyboard on a lighter table so I think those rules are really good to guide you just for you to not create something that makes absolutely no sense to anyone
↗Thiago Costa - Cultivating taste as a designeryoutube.com 13th of 26 in this recording
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Our reading
Small details add up: people who are not attuned to design still sense a product's overall polish.
Their wordsthese things stack up if you do a stitch there and the shadow here and any works as a cohesive product the people sense it even people that are not really at tuned to design they feel the overall package they feel the Polish
↗Thiago Costa - Cultivating taste as a designeryoutube.com 14th of 26 in this recording
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Their wordsyou can make a button in literally 10 seconds but what if you add some texture to it get a customer curious to click it you want to just touch it and that's usually how things work work in real life too
↗Thiago Costa - Cultivating taste as a designeryoutube.com 15th of 26 in this recording
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Their wordsnowadays I think his feedback was wrong and I think it's kind of a blessing in disguise not having founder market fit
↗Thiago Costa - Cultivating taste as a designeryoutube.com 16th of 26 in this recording
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Their wordsbeing curious I think it's like the number one quality that a design could have just ask questions
↗Thiago Costa - Cultivating taste as a designeryoutube.com 17th of 26 in this recording
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Their wordsI think that's what defines taste you're exposed to these underlying configurations of how things look and we always search for symmetry you always search for things that are in order accidentally the nature is is perfect right everything is in order it's mathematically perfect but at the same time you know they change they move they're colors they're light so exposing yourself to those things and and understanding how these things make everything look is how you practice taste
↗Thiago Costa - Cultivating taste as a designeryoutube.com 18th of 26 in this recording
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Their wordstaste changes it doesn't mean that someone has a better taste than someone else is just this heightened awareness of how things are configured and then when you have this awareness attuned you can learn from it and apply
↗Thiago Costa - Cultivating taste as a designeryoutube.com 19th of 26 in this recording
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Their wordsthere's a lot of talks on AI and AI is going to replace the designers and and things like that and and I think he will but not all of them
↗Thiago Costa - Cultivating taste as a designeryoutube.com 20th of 26 in this recording
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Their wordsthe value of craft is increasing with the tools getting better because you can spin up a landing page nowadays in minutes for sure but at least now they're not going to look or they're not going to feel the same way as someone pouring their heart and soul into it might be a hot take I might be wrong
↗Thiago Costa - Cultivating taste as a designeryoutube.com 21st of 26 in this recording
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Their wordsAI to build UI is going to be trained with other why and everything that we've done in the past so why if you want to break out of this mold you're still going to need someone to just like Break The Rules
↗Thiago Costa - Cultivating taste as a designeryoutube.com 22nd of 26 in this recording
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Their wordsI think you have to start with history art ground them in the world not go straight to tools tools common tomorrow maybe figma is not going to be here
↗Thiago Costa - Cultivating taste as a designeryoutube.com 23rd of 26 in this recording
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Their wordsdesigners really need to be good communicators he ties back to that shower thought sometimes if you have this idea and you can't articulate them to your team it gets really difficult to do something meaningful
↗Thiago Costa - Cultivating taste as a designeryoutube.com 24th of 26 in this recording
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Their wordshow do you articulate that beauty is important beauty simplifies Beauty makes people understand your product better care about your product uh remember your product
↗Thiago Costa - Cultivating taste as a designeryoutube.com 25th of 26 in this recording
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Our reading
Design is a visual profession, but the best designers are the ones who listen really well.
Their wordsit's very paradoxical because design is a very visual profession but I think the best designers are the ones who listen really well
↗Thiago Costa - Cultivating taste as a designeryoutube.com 26th of 26 in this recording
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