Taste as Technology
Taste is a technical skill. It can be developed. It can be applied. It compounds.
The misconception: taste is aesthetic preference — the fonts you pick, the color palette, the feel of a product. That’s the surface expression. The underlying skill is noticing what’s wrong before you can articulate why.
How Taste Works
Taste is pattern recognition operating below the threshold of language.
You’ve seen enough good work that you feel the wrongness of bad work before you can explain it. That sensation — the slight friction, the sense that something’s off — is the signal. The craft is learning to trust it and then backtrack to the reason.
Jony Ive didn’t approve a design because it “felt right.” He approved it because decades of looking at objects had trained him to recognize when material, form, and function were genuinely unified — and when they were merely decorating each other.
Building Your Taste
- Consume widely, slowly. Don’t just use great products — study them. What made this button placement obvious? Why does this onboarding sequence work?
- Make things you’ll show people. Taste sharpens fastest under social accountability.
- Steal like a craftsperson. Copy first, understand why later, diverge eventually.
- Get uncomfortable with “good enough.” The gap between your taste and your current output is where growth lives.
Why It’s a Moat
Taste can’t be feature-flagged. It’s not a capability you add with a sprint. It’s accumulated through thousands of decisions made by someone who cared.
The products that feel inevitable — Notion, Linear, Teenage Engineering’s OP-1, the original iPhone — all carry the fingerprint of someone’s taste applied at every level.
See: [[why-builders-ship]] for the motivation that sustains the accumulation.