Featured · Craft
What twenty-four years taught me about taste.
Taste is not a vibe. It is a thousand small decisions, made consistently, until they start to look like instinct. Here is how I think about building it in a team.
8 min read
For a long time I thought taste was something you either had or you didn’t. You walked into a room, looked at the work, and you just knew. The good people knew faster. That was the whole theory, and it was wrong in the way most flattering theories are wrong: it let the people who already had it off the hook for explaining it, and it told everyone else the door was locked.
Twenty-four years in, I’ve changed my mind. Taste isn’t a gift that arrives whole. It’s a residue. It’s what’s left after you’ve made the same kind of decision a few thousand times and started to notice which versions of it held up and which ones quietly embarrassed you six months later. The speed that looks like instinct is real, but it’s earned. It’s compression, not magic.
I want to be careful here, because the word “taste” gets used to win arguments. People say “it’s a taste thing” when they mean “I don’t want to explain myself,” and that’s a small abuse of a real idea. So let me try to say what I actually think taste is, and then how you build it — in yourself and, harder, in a team.
Taste is a stack of small decisions
Here is the part that took me the longest to accept: there is rarely one big tasteful decision. There is a long sequence of small ones, and taste is the discipline of caring about each one slightly more than the situation strictly requires.
The kerning on a wordmark nobody will consciously notice. The third option you killed because it was almost there and almost is the most dangerous place to stop. The product photo you reshot because the model’s hand looked tense. The two words you cut from a headline so the line would breathe. None of these decisions is important on its own. You could get any single one of them wrong and the work would survive. But taste is the cumulative effect of getting a thousand of them slightly more right than you had to, and the strange thing about that accumulation is that people can feel it even when they can’t name it.
That’s why taste reads as instinct from the outside. The audience never sees the thousand decisions. They see the residue — a thing that feels inevitable, like it couldn’t have been otherwise — and they call it good. What they’re actually responding to is consistency of care.
It is built by paying attention to your own regret
If I had to name the single mechanism that builds taste, it wouldn’t be inspiration or exposure. It would be regret, used well.
Early in my career I’d ship something, feel good about it, and move on. The work that actually taught me anything was the work I revisited months later and winced at. Not the failures — the near misses. The things that were fine. “Fine” is the most instructive grade there is, because it means you were close enough to see what better would have looked like and you stopped anyway. If you can train yourself to remember why you stopped — tired, rushed, conflict-averse, in love with your own first idea — you start to recognize those conditions in real time, and you push past them before they calcify into the work.
So a lot of building taste is just keeping an honest ledger with yourself. Not a brutal one. An honest one. The brutal version, where nothing is ever good and you flay yourself for every comma, doesn’t make better work — it makes anxious people who play not to lose. The honest version is quieter. It just asks, was that the best version of this decision, or the most convenient one? and it’s willing to sit with an uncomfortable answer.
Exposure matters, but not the way people think
People will tell you to build taste by consuming great work, and they’re not wrong, but the advice is usually shallow. Looking at beautiful things is pleasant and mostly passive. It can make you a better admirer without making you a better maker.
The version that works is more effortful: don’t just look at work you love, figure out the decision underneath it. Why is this layout calm when it has so much in it? Why does this brand feel expensive with no expensive materials anywhere? Why does this sentence land and the one beneath it doesn’t? You’re not collecting references. You’re reverse-engineering judgment. Done enough times, this turns admiration into a vocabulary, and vocabulary is what lets you make decisions quickly instead of flailing toward something that “feels right.”
And widen the aperture. Some of the most useful taste I’ve developed came from outside my discipline — from how a good restaurant paces a meal, how a tailor handles a shoulder, how a film cuts away one beat before you expect it. Taste isn’t domain-specific at the root. It’s a sensitivity to proportion, restraint, and timing that happens to express itself in whatever medium you’re standing in.
Taste in a team is a different, harder problem
Building taste in yourself is a long private project. Building it in a team is a leadership problem, and most of the usual instincts make it worse.
The first wrong instinct is to become the bottleneck — to make yourself the single point of taste through which all work must pass for a yes. It feels responsible. It even works for a while. But it caps the team’s ceiling at your availability, teaches everyone to design for your approval rather than the actual standard, and quietly tells your most talented people that their judgment doesn’t count. You don’t scale taste by hoarding it. You scale it by transferring it.
So the real work is making your decisions legible. When you change something, say why — not “this feels better,” which teaches nothing, but the actual reason: this is louder than the idea deserves; we’re solving for the wrong moment; this is fine and we don’t ship fine here. Every time you explain the decision underneath the decision, you hand someone a tool they keep. Do it enough and you stop being asked the easy questions, because the team has internalized the reasoning and only brings you the genuinely hard calls. That’s the goal. A team with taste isn’t one that agrees with you. It’s one that argues with you well.
The second wrong instinct is to confuse taste with control. A tasteful team needs room to be wrong on the way to being right. If every exploration is graded, people stop exploring and start performing competence, and performed competence is the enemy of good work — it’s safe, legible, and dead. You protect the messy middle of the process on purpose, and you reserve the standard for what ships. Loose in the studio, exacting at the door.
The commercial part nobody wants to say out loud
I lead creative, but I’ve spent my career close enough to the business to know that taste without consequence is just decoration. The thing I’ll defend hardest is that taste and commercial outcome are not opposites. The false war between “make it beautiful” and “make it work” has cost our industry an enormous amount of credibility, and it’s usually a sign that someone hasn’t done the harder work of making it beautiful because it works.
The most tasteful decisions I’ve made were also the most commercial ones, and not by coincidence. A product page that’s calmer converts better because it respects the customer’s attention. A brand that holds its line across a thousand touchpoints compounds trust, and trust is the cheapest growth there is. Restraint reads as confidence, and confidence sells. When taste and results diverge, it’s almost always because the taste was actually vanity wearing taste’s clothes — decisions made to impress peers rather than serve the work. Real taste has skin in the game.
What’s actually changed, and what hasn’t
I do this work differently than I did even two years ago. A lot of the mechanical distance between an idea and seeing it has collapsed — I can explore more directions, faster, and put real options in front of myself in an afternoon that used to take a week. That changes the pace of judgment. It does not change the judgment.
If anything, taste matters more now, because the cost of producing competent, plausible, on-trend work has fallen to nearly zero. When everyone can generate the obvious version instantly, the obvious version stops being valuable. What’s left — the only thing left — is knowing which version is actually good, and why, and being willing to throw away nine excellent options to protect the tenth. That’s taste. It was the scarce thing before, and it’s the scarce thing now. The tools just made it the whole thing.
The short version
If you want to build taste, make a lot of decisions, keep an honest ledger of the ones you got merely fine, and learn the conditions under which you settle. Reverse-engineer the work you admire instead of just admiring it. Widen where you look. And if you lead people, make your reasoning a gift you give away rather than a gate you stand at, because the measure of your taste as a leader isn’t the work you approve — it’s the work your team makes when you’re not in the room.
Taste isn’t a vibe. It’s a practice that eventually looks like instinct. The good news in that sentence is the whole point: if it’s a practice, it’s available to anyone willing to care about the small decisions a little more than they have to, for a long time.
I’m still in it. Twenty-four years and I still ship things that are merely fine and wince later. The difference is that now I know what the wince is for.
