Design taste is a business skill. Here's how I developed mine.
Early in my career, I thought being a good designer meant mastering the tools. Knowing every shortcut in Illustrator. Nailing a perfect grid. Matching hex values by memory. I was wrong about what actually mattered.
Fourteen years later, the thing clients pay me for isn't my speed with Figma or my ability to kern type by eye. It's my taste. The way I look at things. The way I get inspired. The time I need to step away and let my brain reset. What I see, what I listen to, how all of that filters back into the work.
Taste sounds like a soft skill. Something you either have or you don't. I used to think that too. But taste is a pattern library built from thousands of decisions, shaped by your experiences, your obsessions, the stuff you consume without thinking about it. It's accumulated judgment. And in a world where AI can generate a logo in twelve seconds, it might be the only thing left that's actually hard to copy.
Taste isn't about aesthetics
Most people confuse taste with having a pretty portfolio. But the designers I respect most aren't the ones with the flashiest Dribbble pages. They're the ones who consistently make decisions that hold up over time.
I should be honest about something, though. Taste isn't neutral. The sociologist Pierre Bourdieu spent years studying the cultural preferences of French households and concluded that what we call 'good taste' is often just the taste of whatever class has the most social capital. Our aesthetic codes are shaped by education, upbringing, who we grew up around. I think about this more than I probably should. It doesn't make taste useless as a professional tool, but it does mean you should know where yours comes from. The best taste is self aware taste.
So what does it actually look like in practice? It's knowing when a design is 'almost there' versus done. Catching the moment a project tips from interesting into try hard. Sometimes it's just the instinct to subtract when the brief is screaming at you to add more.
I'll admit, I still roll my eyes when a client asks me to 'make it pop'. But taste is what helps me translate that into something specific. They don't actually want louder colors. They want the important thing to feel important. That translation is the job.
How I actually built it
I wish I had a cleaner story here. Some single project or course that flipped a switch. It didn't work like that. Taste developed slowly, through a few unglamorous habits.
I fed my brain outside of design. I love to cook. I'm addicted to music. I watch everything from independent films to whatever series everyone's talking about. Music especially does something to me. There's an interview with James Murphy where he talks about how he spent his entire twenties paralyzed by the fear of failing, doing nothing, and then one day he just made 'Losing My Edge', the first thing he'd ever created where he wasn't trying to be something he thought he was supposed to be. He was just trying to be himself. And people responded to it. That story hits me every time I hear it, because taste works the same way. You can spend years imitating what you think good design looks like, or you can start paying attention to what actually moves you and let that become the work. Once you start letting those inputs bleed into your design, the connections are everywhere.
I kept a personal 'taste file'. Not a mood board. A running collection of things that made me feel something, good or bad. Screenshots of packaging in grocery stores. Photos of terrible signage. Menus from restaurants that got the typography right without trying too hard. Over time, patterns emerged. I started to see what I was drawn to and, more useful, what I was consistently repelled by.
I made a lot of bad work. This is the part nobody likes to talk about. I look back at work I did years ago and I'm almost ashamed of it. Generic brand identities that checked every box and said nothing. But I think that feeling is actually a good sign. If you can look at your old work and cringe, it means your taste outgrew your past ability. That gap is proof you're developing.
I found people whose taste I trusted and paid attention. Specific designers, art directors, artists, musicians whose work I kept coming back to because something about it felt inevitable. I studied their choices. Why that typeface. Why that amount of whitespace. Why they left that thing out. I read books that challenged what I thought design even was. Erik Carter's Design Harder made me rethink the profession's purpose. Ruben Pater's CAPS LOCK forced me to confront how design and capitalism are tangled together, and whether it's even possible to do this work ethically. That kind of reading doesn't teach you a new technique. It recalibrates your taste at a deeper level.
Why this matters for clients
A client doesn't hire me because I can make things look nice. Canva exists. AI exists. Looking nice is table stakes now.
They hire me because I can walk into a room full of directions and confidently say: this one. Not because I read it in a trend report, but because I've spent over a decade building the instinct that tells me which direction will age well, feel honest, and actually connect with their audience.
That confidence saves them time. It saves them from the second guessing loop where everything looks 'fine' but nothing feels right. They're paying for the years of judgment that sit behind every recommendation I make.
I've watched projects go sideways when taste wasn't in the room. A startup spending six months cycling through Fiverr logos because nobody could tell them what 'good' looked like for their brand. A company rebranding with a committee of twelve where every decision got averaged into mediocrity. Pater writes about how platforms like Fiverr pit designers against each other to deliver the best results for the lowest price. That race to the bottom produces a lot of 'fine' work. But a brand isn't a commodity. As the design collective Metahaven put it, 'There is much more to branding than a logo or style. It is a manifestation of power.' Taste is what stops a brand from becoming interchangeable with the thousands of others competing for the same attention.
The AI question
I get asked about this constantly now. 'Will AI replace designers?' My honest answer: it will replace designers who don't have taste.
AI is good at generating options. It can produce fifty logo variations before lunch. What it can't do is tell you which one is right for your audience, in your market, at this particular moment in your brand's life. That part still requires a person with judgment.
The tools will keep getting better. The suggestions will get more plausible. And 'plausible' is exactly the problem. Good enough is everywhere now. The space between good enough and actually good is where I spend most of my time, and that space is becoming more valuable, not less.
I use AI in parts of my workflow. I'm not precious about it. But the moment I hand over the 'is this right?' decision to a machine, I've given away the one thing that took fourteen years to build.
Taste compounds
The thing about taste that's hard to communicate in a portfolio is that it compounds. Every project makes the next one better, but not the way skill does. Skill makes you faster. Taste is different. Taste makes you more sure about what to leave out.
Ten years ago, I'd spend days exploring directions I can now eliminate in minutes. Not because I'm lazier. Because I've already seen where those roads end. The client gets a better result, faster, because the filter is better.
If you're a designer early in your career, the best investment you can make isn't another tool subscription or tutorial. Go look at things. Cook something. Listen to an album that has nothing to do with design. Make work, hate some of it, keep going. Your taste is already forming. You just can't see it yet.
I build brand identities and landing pages in days, not months. If you're working on something and want to talk, book a free 30-minute call or start a project.
