Taste is a design tool, not a garnish

Design has plenty of rules, and I like most of them: contrast ratios, grid systems, the rule of thirds, and the laws of usability someone is always happy to quote. They’re useful because they were hard-won. Someone got it wrong enough times that we wrote it down.

But rules only get you so far. They’ll stop you from making something bad. They won’t make it good.

The gap rules can’t close

Two products can follow every guideline and still feel completely different in the hand. One feels considered and the other feels assembled. The difference is taste. It’s the judgement you build up over time that tells you to use this radius, this weight, this word, and not the others that were technically fine.

People sometimes treat taste as decoration, something added at the end once the “real” engineering is done. I think that’s backwards. Taste decides what you build before it decides how the thing looks. It tells you when a feature shouldn’t exist, when three settings should be one, or when the honest version of a thing is simpler than the impressive one.

Rules tell you what’s allowed. Taste tells you what’s worth doing.

Taste can be learned

The other myth is that taste is innate: you either have it or you don’t. I don’t believe that. Taste is pattern recognition, and you build it by paying attention. You look closely at a lot of things and notice which ones you love and which ones you merely tolerate. Then you do the harder work of asking why.

Some habits that help:

• Handle good objects often, and ask what makes them good.
• Keep the things that have lasted, and study why they lasted.
• Make things yourself. Nothing sharpens judgement like building something and living with your mistakes.
• Notice when you’re impressed rather than moved. They’re different feelings.

Taste with humility

Taste goes wrong when it becomes a way of dismissing people. The point isn’t to have better opinions than everyone else. It’s to care enough about the person on the other end to sweat the details they’ll never consciously notice but will always feel.

Good rules and good taste aren’t rivals. The best work I’ve seen uses rules as a floor and taste as the reason to climb.