Everyone's talking about taste

Taste is about discovery, having interest in things, and making a lot of mistakes. It’s about trying to find the authentic set of choices that both reflect your own background, but also the choices and discoveries that you have made consciously and deliberately. It's always changing and it's also always in reflection of what everyone else is doing ... See more

Developing taste is an exercise in vulnerability: it requires you to trust your instincts and preferences, even when they don’t align with current trends or the tastes of your peers. Because while having taste is cool, taste itself reflects a certain type of uncool earnestness – a commitment to one’s own obsessions and quirks.

Taste is about preference. When someone has "good taste" they have well-refined preferences. Taste sounds like a snotty term that a sommelier uses, but we all have tastes, even if we're not talking about taste in full-bodied reds from Northern Italy. We have taste in music, taste in design, and taste in literature (even if your literature is banger... See more

the challenge. What is good? What is interesting? That part of the work is taste. “Taste is what enables designers to navigate the vast sea of possibilities that technology and global connectivity afford, and to then select and combine these elements in ways that, ideally, result in interesting, unique work

Like many writers before me, I tend to lean on vague hand-waving when the need to define taste, or rather, good taste, arises. A common trope is to use the phrase US Supreme Court justice Stewart famously gave to describe obscenity, a similarly hard-to-describe bedfellow of taste, in 1964: “I know it when I see it.” In design, good taste can be kno... See more