Florianópolis, Brazil
Connecting strategy, people and design to make sense of complex things.
I'm Fernando Casanova, a product, service, and design strategy leader with 20 years across aviation, banking, investment, healthcare, commerce, and AI. Fernando Casanova. Most recently a Design Director at Merkle/dentsu, leading a 12-person UX/UI design team across four countries for brands including Disney, Kellogg's, Santander, and ASDA. I work where strategy, experience, and execution meet, from early vision to delivered product.
Organizations I've Worked With
2020-2025
Selected Work
Research, principles and the design system behind the new booking experience
Orchestrating Complexity Across a Global Airline
Led product design for British Airways' booking experience and reusable design foundations within the Nexus programme.
Impact: A redesigned booking experience and reusable design foundations for the Nexus programme.
The core customer journeys, inside a Deloitte Digital team
Everyday Banking People Could Trust
Led journey and interaction design on Banco de Fomento Angola's new mobile banking app, turning complex financial services into an experience customers could trust and navigate with confidence.
Impact: A trusted set of banking journeys, now live and promoted by the bank
Established the CX capability: listening, measurement and governed improvement
Customer Experience as an Operating Model
Established the Customer Experience operating model for adidas Global Business Services: a listening program, measurement framework, governed improvement, and the operational products that run it across global hubs.
Impact: A working CX capability, from Voice of the Partner to governed improvement and daily operations
Built the design team and the white-label design system
Confidence in Alternative Investments
Led product design on TitanBay's private-market platform, turning the complexity of alternative investments into an experience wealth managers and their clients could navigate with confidence.
Impact: A private-market investment experience and white-label design system for wealth managers and their clients.
Product design across four regulators' guidance, as one service
Clarity for AI Regulation in Healthcare
Led product design on the NHS Digital Regulations Service, making one of the UK's most complex regulatory landscapes navigable for developers and adopters of AI in health and social care.
Impact: A clearer, standards-based path through NICE, MHRA, HRA, and CQC requirements
Research and wearable prototypes across the project lifecycle
Designing for the Human Side of Industry 4.0
Design research and wearable-interaction experiments exploring how emerging technology could understand and support workers' physical and mental experience on the factory floor.
Impact: Field-tested wearable self-report concepts and published design-research contributions
Currently
What I'm Building
I'm the founding design lead at an AI startup building a legal technology platform. The hard part isn't technical. Legal professionals work with high stakes, professional liability, and nuanced judgment. AI can help with research, drafting, and pattern recognition at scale, but it can't hold accountability, and it shouldn't try.
So the design question is how to make AI a capable collaborator rather than a black box: visible, correctable, and clearly subordinate to professional judgment. In practice that means AI-assisted drafting and review flows, source transparency, and human approval for high-stakes work. The aim is interfaces that leave lawyers sharper for having used the tool, not replaced.
I also build what I design: production frontend code, written with AI-assisted development and shipped through engineering review, so the distance between design intent and working product stays short.
"The question isn't what AI can do. It's what AI should be responsible for."
Leadership
How I Lead
Not what I manage. How I think about the work of leading design at senior level.
01
Creating clarity in complexity
My primary job as a design leader isn't to have the best ideas. It's to create the conditions for good decisions. In ambiguous situations, I'm the person who asks the uncomfortable clarifying questions, names what's actually happening, and builds shared understanding fast enough that work can move.
A UX/UI design team of 12 across the UK, Portugal, India, and Brazil, as Design Director at Merkle/dentsu.
02
Coaching designers into product thinkers
I hold craft to a high standard. What I invest in most is whether the people I work with develop the judgment to connect their decisions to user needs, technical constraints, and business priorities. The best investment I've made in every role is in the growth of the people around me.
Design professor for 7 years and MBA lecturer; founded the Eureka! startup incubation programme at UEMG.
03
Building genuine trust with engineering and product
Design doesn't win by being right. It wins by being trusted. I've worked hard to understand how engineers think, how product managers prioritise, and what the business actually needs. Not so I can compromise, but so I can collaborate from a place of genuine respect.
At adidas, I adapted the design foundations to the PowerApps environment in partnership with developers.
04
Staying in the details without losing the direction
The trap for senior designers is becoming too abstract to be useful. I stay deliberate about being in the specifics, not to micromanage, but because strategic insight often hides in the details. The pattern from a usability session that changes the product roadmap. That kind of thing.
At NHS, I worked from a content governance flow with a named role at every gate; at TitanBay, I designed a suitability step that sits before the opportunities list.
05
Autonomy with accountability
The teams I've built operate with high autonomy and clear expectations. I don't check everything. I set clear goals, give people room to move, and build an environment where surfacing problems early, before they become crises, is encouraged rather than penalised.
Built and led a new product design team at TitanBay, from first hire through delivery.
06
Making design earn its seat at the table
Design influence isn't given. It's built. I've earned it in every organisation I've worked in by speaking the language of the business, by showing what design does for outcomes rather than just aesthetics, and by being the person who follows through when it's inconvenient.
Quantum Design, co-founded and grown from a solo practice to a full-service studio over 12 years.
In their words
From the people I've worked with
Excerpts from recommendations on LinkedIn. Two are translated from the Portuguese.
“He led our team of 12 designers with clarity, creativity and genuine care. He brought a strong design vision and … created a team culture where people felt supported, heard, and motivated to do their best work. One thing I really appreciated was how much trust Fernando placed in me and my work, it gave me the confidence to take ownership and grow in ways I hadn't expected.”
Beatriz Catarino Martins
Product Designer, Merkle / dentsu
Reported to Fernando · January 2026
Recommendations on LinkedIn“He has a rare quality: the tireless curiosity of an adventurer allied to the pragmatism of an experienced manager. … In financial and project management, his conduct was always guided by transparency, seriousness and maturity. He is a leader who not only understands the new but knows how to turn it into real value for the business.”
Isabelle Maluf Fernandes
Design Lead; partner at Quantum Design for over 12 years
Ran a business with Fernando · May 2026 · Translated from the Portuguese
Recommendations on LinkedIn“As a professor, Fernando was a respectful colleague, always willing to help with teaching and learning activities. He encouraged students, professors and researchers alike. As director of Quantum, Fernando enabled me to improve my management and creative skills. On every project we did together he always encouraged me to pursue impactful results.”
Ivan Santos
Full Professor, Arts and Design Institute, Federal University of Juiz de Fora
Colleague at UEMG and at Quantum Design · August 2023 · Translated from the Portuguese
Recommendations on LinkedIn