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- 🔗 🧠#18 Developing Taste
🔗 🧠#18 Developing Taste
How to develop taste to make better design choices
Jake Zuke
March 21, 2025
Five resources every week with actionable takeaways to make you a better designer.
What makes good design, good? Sometimes this question is pretty objective. If something isn’t easy to use, it doesn’t properly communicate purpose, or is inaccessible in general—you’re already not starting on a good foot.
But what about the more subjective stuff? The gut reactions to why people flock towards certain brands and stay away from others. Why some living rooms are more than functional—they feel like an art piece, while others feel like a lackluster shell.
The difference between good design and great design often lives in this nebulous space we call "taste." It's the inherent feeling of "oh I like that" vs "hmm something feels wrong." Some people seem to naturally have it, while others struggle to develop it.
This week, we're diving into the concept of taste in design — what it is, how to cultivate it, and why it matters more than ever in an age where technical skills are becoming increasingly accessible to everyone.
— Jake
TODAY'S EDITION
TASTE SETTING
Is "good taste" something we're born with, or something we develop? While we often hear that taste is purely subjective, we may be dealing with something more nuanced. There seems to be a shared understanding of what constitutes "good design" that goes beyond just personal preference.
Rather than looking at taste as an almighty gift bestowed upon a lucky few, we might better understand it as a skill — a muscle that strengthens through exposure, thoughtful analysis, and practice. Like learning to point out complex flavors in wine or coffee, developing design taste requires both experience and attention.
THE JUICE
The Taste Gap: Your taste will always develop faster than your skills. That frustrating chasm between "I know this isn't good" and "I can't make it better yet" can be motivation for growth opportunities. Embrace it.
Build Your Taste Muscle: Actively expand your palette by poking your head into different styles, even ones you don't personally love. Create a collection of work you admire and specifically note what makes each piece effective, not just that you like it.
Taste vs. Quality: There's an important distinction to make here. Taste lives in the observer, quality exists in the object itself. The concept becomes more productive when framed objectively around measurable or comparable qualities.
The Elements of Objective Taste: Good taste isn't random — it's based on recognizable qualities: materials that fit their purpose, ergonomics that consider user needs, effective affordances, usability, accessibility, harmonious color choices, aesthetic choices that trigger emotion, and intentional visual hierarchy.
Watch for Gatekeeping: Be wary of "good taste" being used as a way to keep other ideas out. Historically, taste has been kept intentionally blurry to prevent certain people from accessing opportunities.
Taste Through Practice: Like any skill, taste develops through practice — exploring new paths, taking risks, making mistakes. Over time, you build a system of what works and why. There's no shortcut to developing this muscle, you gotta put in the time.
The Demystification Project: For design to evolve, we need to start objectively defining quality: what does quality mean for your company, your team, and your career? When we eliminate blurry words and subjectivity from the conversation, our individual taste skills can finally be used to reach shared quality goals.
CONSUMER MINDSET
I have a post-it note on my monitor that says "CREATE MORE THAN YOU CONSUME." It's mostly a reminder to not doom-scroll. But the counter argument to this phrase is that in order to develop good taste — you need to be a conscious consumer of high quality things. You need to look at stuff obsessively to try and pin point what it is about that thing that draws you and everyone else to it.
This is a great resource to start exploring corners of the internet that capture high quality design. And though many of us are designing for digital experiences — don't forget to look up from your screen every once and awhile to find inspiration in the IRL physical world.
THE JUICE
Connecting Dots: With over 1,500 design resources spanning a bunch of categories, toools.design is a perfect partner for consuming with purpose. Instead of random scrolling, you're exploring a carefully filtered collection that exposes you to quality work.
Cross-Disciplinary Inspiration: Discover tools beyond your usual comfort zone — animation resources when you're a UI designer, or icon libraries when you're focused on UX. Often we get stuck in our silos and specific workflows. Exploring output and tools for different disciplines is a great way to further develop taste.
EXPLAIN YOURSELF
As you're traveling along your taste journey, you'll inevitably need to explain why you feel a certain way about something.
Those vague feelings of "something's off" or "this just works" need to be transformed into specific, actionable feedback. Think of design critiques as less of a formality and more of the training grounds where you learn to articulate taste and hone your eyes and gut.
THE JUICE
Teachable Taste: Good taste isn't always natural — but it is a learnable skill that develops through structured conversations about what works and why. The vocabulary of critique gives shape to your instincts.
Structure > Chaos: Vague feelings like "this looks off” might be a good starting point for feedback, but try and explain why. The pressure of articulation forces you to develop language that matches your visual sensibilities.
Beyond Like/Dislike: Great taste goes beyond personal preferences by understanding how design serves goals. By connecting feedback to customer and business objectives, you train yourself to evaluate work analytically rather than emotionally.
Context Shapes Perception: Learning to set the stage before presenting work builds your contextual awareness — a staple in heightened taste. You begin to look at design not in isolation, but within its full ecosystem of constraints and possibilities.
THE ART OF TASTE
Thiago Costa, co-founder of Fey, has some solid insights on developing taste. Insights that don’t revolve around mastering latest tools or following trends — but more about training your eye to spot what others miss and drawing inspiration from beyond the tech bubble.
THE JUICE
Lean Into Art: Even though I just shared a digital design heavy resource — maybe you need to take a step away from the UI design blogs. Art has been perfecting visual communication for thousands of years. Your next breakthrough might come from a painting, not another app interface.
Break the Source-Code: Don't just copy other digital designs —that's like making a photocopy of a photocopy. Go find inspiration in architecture, nature, film. Your work will feel fresher for it.
Design = Art Ă— Science: The experimental side is art; the problem-solving is science. You need both to create something that works and wows.
Design Spidey-Sense: Great taste comes from noticing what others don't. The misaligned cabinet in that architecture video, how light creates shadows on surfaces. This heightened awareness becomes your superpower.
Real-World Physics → Digital Magic: Study how light behaves in the physical world to make digital designs feel tangible. Subtle shadows and highlights don’t just have to be eye candy — they can make interfaces feel grounded.
Scratch Your Own Itch: The best products often solve the creator's problems first. With all the modern tooling at your disposal, don’t sit on your wacky idea to solve a problem — go bring that wacky idea to life.
Rules Were Made for Breaking: Sometimes ignoring established design rules creates better results. Use your developed taste to focus on what actually looks and feels right in context — not what some Medium article told you to do.
Details Stack Up: Users might not consciously notice the perfect optical alignment or that beautifully crafted animation, but they feel the quality. Visual polish is made up of a thousand tiny well placed decisions
Listening as a Superpower: Though design largely is visual, great taste can often come from listening — to feedback, to users, and to the world around you. Words and language often uncover trains of thought that a visual cannot.
THE WILD WEST
Here we are again. Our favorite topic — AI. You might be wondering: "Jake, why develop taste at all if AI can just create whatever I ask it to?" Valid question. Even as AI generates seemingly beautiful images, apps, videos, and whatever else it’s doing — there's still a crucial human element that’s missing. AI is ultimately just another tool and sandbox for you to use.
Remember when design-minded folks were messing around with Myspace templates or Geocities to express themselves without worrying about too much technical feasibility? AI is letting us do the same thing right now, just on steroids.
Developing good taste in the era of AI is about preparing for a new wild west of the web. And honestly? We should all be stoked about that.
THE JUICE
Technical Skills ≠Good Design: AI might give everyone the technical ability to create designs, but that doesn't mean they'll be good designs. Just like giving everyone a microwave doesn't make everyone a chef.
Design Democratization is Here: With generative AI, the barriers are falling. You don't need a camera to create images or writing skills to craft content anymore. What once may have differentiated designers — technical skill — is becoming universally accessible.
Taste is the New Differentiator: When everyone can technically "do what you do," your ability to make thoughtful, intentional choices becomes your superpower. The eye for what works and what doesn't can't be automated.
Discernment is Critical: Good taste requires navigating seemingly endless possibilities and making decisions that contribute to the whole in purposeful ways. It's about orchestrating hundreds of small choices around a central vision. Also a good time to be a systems thinker.
Context Matters More Than Ever: A tasteful designer understands that elements must work together. That AI-generated graphic might look cool in isolation, but does it fit the site's visual design and align with the brand? Spoiler: probably not.
Intention Over Automation: Creating with intention means every detail expands and enhances a single organizing thought or vision. AI can generate options, but it can't (yet) understand the subtle nuances of what makes something resonate with specific audiences.
The Human Element Remains: Even when AI handles the technical heavy lifting, the time you've spent perfecting your craft hasn't been wasted. Your experience guides which outputs to select, refine, or reject entirely.
Think Beyond the Tool: Just because stakeholders could create something without you doesn't mean it'll achieve their goals or connect with customers. Your value isn't in button pushing or rectangle drawing — it's in vision setting.
THANKS FOR READING—SEE YOU NEXT WEEK
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Cheers, Jake