I was wrong about taste

Colin and Samir showed me where I missed it

Happy Friday.

This week we called it New Media Week at UX Tools.

I made a video about cultural campfires, which is really about how hard it is to get discovered right now, how much noise there is, and how designers are supposed to share their work without becoming full-time content creators.

I also talked to Kevin Espiritu from Epic Gardening, which will probably be one of our lowest-performing podcast episodes because, sure, it has almost nothing to do with design on the surface.

But Kevin is one of the most interesting people in media right now, and I keep finding that some of the best lessons for designers are coming from people outside of design.

All of that was leading here:

Today, my Colin and Samir episode of This Is Taste is live, and it’s the highest quality piece of creative work I’ve ever produced.

– Tommy (@designertom)

What Colin and Samir actually taught me

Last year I wanted to make media that meant more than typical content.

I still believe in the videos, newsletters, podcasts, and all the regular things we make, but I wanted to make something harder. Something with more consequence.

Something I would be proud to have made even if the views didn’t justify the cost.

So I put a HUGE chunk of my own money into a docuseries called This Is Taste. The idea was simple: follow teams I admire for 48 hours and try to understand what taste actually looks like when people are making real work.

At first, I thought taste was going to be about the details. The branding decisions and interaction patterns. The little craft decisions that make something feel expensive, considered, or alive. I was wrong.

The more of these I make, the more obvious it becomes that the internet discourse around taste is pretty shallow compared to the human part of it.

Taste is not just what you make. It is what you choose to care about. It is who you make room for. It is what you are willing to lose money on because you believe the thing should exist.

That is why we made an episode about Colin and Samir. I know some people will ask, fairly, what two YouTubers have to do with design. My answer is that this episode taught me more about taste than most design conversations I have been in lately.

Colin and Samir built a career by making room for other people. They took creators seriously before the rest of the world did (including me). They treated YouTube like it deserved care, not as a place to dump whatever could get clicks.

And that hit me hard because I am still trying to figure out how to make work that feels worth it.

I spent years doing the practical design work that fed my family. Dashboards. Tables. The kind of work that makes you better but doesn’t always feel life-giving.

When I got laid off in 2021, I started making media because I wanted to give something back to the design community that gave me a career.

Even now, with the audience and the newsletter and a name people recognize, I am not sitting on some giant pile of money. I take sponsorships because they feed my family and the five people on this team. I am grateful for that, and I am also still trying to build something I have not sold my soul to make.

We spent weeks on this film. We flew a small crew to New York six weeks after my daughter was born. We poured ourselves into a 28-minute episode that might only get 10,000 views.

On paper, the math is stupid. But I have never regretted making something I was proud of, and I won’t start now.

So today I am asking for your attention. Not your money. Your attention.

Please watch the Colin and Samir episode of This Is Taste. Watch it all the way through.

If it moves you, send it to one person who cares about making better work.

There is so much slop on the internet right now. So much garbage and AI noise. If we want better things to exist, we have to support them when people take the risk to make them.

This is the biggest swing I’ve ever taken.

Thanks for your support.

— Tommy