Taste isn't instinct. It's something you build deliberately over time, and it's one of the most valuable things you can bring to any room.

You'll hear the word constantly. In critiques, in job interviews, in the way a creative director describes someone they rate. Taste. It gets used as though it's something you either have or you don't. Something innate, fixed, arrived at by accident of upbringing or luck of exposure. That framing does a lot of damage to a lot of designers early in their careers.

Taste is built. Here's how.

Looking is part of the job.

The degree is weighted toward making. Rightly so, production is the deliverable. But the education that develops taste happens in the hours spent looking at work outside your immediate brief. Architecture. Photography. Film. Editorial. The designers with the sharpest eye in any room are almost always the ones who consume most widely and most intentionally. Feed it.

Knowing what's good isn't enough. Knowing why is the skill.

Anyone can point at a piece of work and call it beautiful. The useful thing, the thing that makes you better, is being able to articulate what makes it work. The proportion. The move in the typography. The decision that was made and the ten decisions that weren't. When you can explain the why, you can apply it. When you can only feel it, you're dependent on instinct alone.

Reference without understanding is just mood boarding.

Collecting images is easy. Understanding what you're drawn to, and why, is where taste actually develops. Every time you save something, ask what it's doing. What problem is it solving? What did the designer give up to get there? The answer to those questions, accumulated over years, is what taste actually is.

Taste requires you to have an opinion.

Not a preference. An opinion. Something you can defend, that you've arrived at through looking and thinking and arguing with yourself. The designers who develop genuine taste are the ones willing to say this works and this doesn't, and willing to be wrong about it, and willing to update their thinking when they are.

Your taste will be invisible in bad work and obvious in good work.

When a project has constraints, difficult clients, a tight budget and a rushed timeline, taste is what remains when everything else is stripped back. The ability to make a considered decision inside a difficult set of conditions is what separates designers who have built something real from ones who are still relying on favourable circumstances.

Building taste takes longer than building any other skill.

Software can be learned in weeks. Taste compounds over years. Which means the designers who take it seriously earliest are the ones who arrive in rooms five years later with something the others are only just starting to develop. Start now. Look at everything. Question all of it.

Grab yourself a flat white and pull up a seat. The real learning is just beginning.

Shot of the good stuff.