What is taste and how can you develop it?

Every designer or developer you admire has taste. You can feel it the moment you open their work — the proportions are right, the colors sit together perfectly, the interactions feel inevitable. It looks effortless. And that effortlessness is exactly what makes taste seem like a gift rather than a skill.

Taste is pattern recognition

At its core, taste is the ability to recognize quality. It's the accumulated memory of everything you've ever seen, used, and reacted to. The more high-quality work you consume — really consume, not just scroll past — the more reference points you build. Your brain starts to notice what separates good from great, and eventually that sense becomes instinctive.

The gap that hurts

Ira Glass described it best. There's a period in every creative's life where their taste outpaces their ability. You know what good looks like, but you can't make it yet. That gap feels crushing. Most people stop here. The ones who make it through just keep making things anyway, accepting the gap as part of the process.

How to actually develop it

Study work you admire slowly. Don't just save it to a folder — sit with it. Ask why the spacing feels right, why those two typefaces work together, why the animation has that exact duration. Screenshot UI you love and annotate it. Rebuild interactions from scratch so you understand how they're built, not just what they look like.

The daily practice

Spend 15 minutes every morning looking at one thing you find genuinely beautiful — a product, a film still, a piece of typography, an architectural photo. Don't analyze it to death. Just let the quality land. Over time, this tunes your eye. Taste compounds. The more good work you've absorbed, the better your next decision becomes.