Notes on taste

People talk about taste like an inheritance — you have it or you do not. Ten years in, I think taste is closer to a savings account: small, regular deposits of attention, compounding.

Every designer I admire does the same unglamorous thing: they notice. They can tell you why a menu feels heavy, why a serif feels smug, why a green is cheap. Not because they memorised rules, but because they stopped scrolling long enough to ask the question.

Practising it

Three habits, none of them mystical. Collect ruthlessly — not moodboards of everything, but a small folder of work that makes you jealous. Copy privately — redraw the thing you admire until you can see the decisions inside it. And ship your opinion — taste that never survives contact with users is just preference.

The last one is the filter. Plenty of people have opinions about design. Taste is what remains after the world has edited them.