You Think You Have Taste. You Probably Don't.

Taste Is Not What You Think It Is

Most people think taste is about having good opinions. Liking the right music, wearing the right things, using the right apps. But that is not taste. That is preference. Taste is something harder and rarer.

Taste is knowing why something is good. Not just feeling it, but being able to see it clearly enough that you could almost explain it, even when you cannot find the exact words. It is the thing that makes a designer at Apple look at a rounded corner and know it is 2 pixels off. It is what made Dieter Rams throw out a radio design because a single dial felt wrong in the hand. That kind of obsessive clarity is not a personality quirk. It is a trained skill.

And here is the uncomfortable part: most of us have not trained it.

Why Silicon Valley Got This Wrong for So Long

For a long time, tech companies thought taste was optional. Ship features, fix bugs, grow users. That was the whole game. If the thing worked, it was good enough.

Then something changed. Software got cheap to build. Good enough became everywhere. And suddenly, when every app could do roughly the same things, the ones that felt right started winning. Not because they had more features, but because using them felt like the product actually cared about you.

Look at Linear. It is a project management tool. There are a hundred project management tools. But Linear is fast, clean, and precise in a way that feels almost physical. People who use it talk about it the way they talk about a good pen. Notion did something similar, building a tool that felt like it respected how your brain actually works. These companies did not win on functionality alone. They won on sensibility.

The thing is, you cannot easily copy sensibility. You can copy a feature in a week. Copying the ten thousand small decisions that made Linear feel the way it does would take years, and by then you still might not get it right. Taste compounds. Each good decision makes the next one easier, and the whole thing becomes a kind of institutional knowledge that lives in the product itself.

Taste Is Not a Gift. It Is Reps.

Here is the part nobody wants to hear. You do not just have taste or not have it. You build it, slowly, through a lot of looking and making and being honest with yourself about what is bad.

Emil Kowalski (opens in new tab) puts it simply: you develop taste by consuming a lot, making a lot, and reflecting on both. That middle part, the making, is where most people quit. It is easy to look at great work and feel something. It is much harder to try to make something good yourself and figure out why it keeps falling short.

Paul Graham (opens in new tab) makes the same point. You learn to recognize quality by trying to create it and failing. When you try to write a clean, sharp sentence and it keeps coming out muddy, you start to understand what clean and sharp actually means. When you try to design a simple interface and it keeps feeling cluttered, you start to see the decisions that make simplicity possible.

The gap between what you can recognize as good and what you can make is real. Every person with taste started with that gap. The only way to close it is to ship things and then be honest about what did not work.

Strong Opinions About Small Things

One sign you are developing taste is that you start caring about things that seem too small to care about. The weight of a button tap. The way an error message is phrased. The exact amount of white space between two elements on a screen.

This is not fussiness. This is taste doing its job. When something feels slightly off, that discomfort is information. It means your eye has gotten ahead of your hand. You can feel the problem before you can fully explain it.

Spotify knows this. Their Discover Weekly feature works partly because it respects your attention. It does not overwhelm you. It makes one confident bet each week and trusts you to follow it. That confidence, that restraint, is a taste decision. Someone at Spotify had to say no to more and yes to less. That takes courage, because users often ask for more. Taste means committing to a vision even when the easier path is to just give people what they ask for.

Caring about small things is not perfectionism for its own sake. It is the belief that the small things are actually what the whole thing is made of.

“The design is not just what it looks like and feels like. The design is how it works” - Steve Jobs