How to build taste
Where it comes from, how it breaks, and why most teams lose it without knowing.
I’ve spent many years building apps, appliances and somewhere along the way, I realised the hardest part isn’t speed or scale. It’s taste. The quiet, internal logic that makes a product feel like it was made with care.
Not everyone sees it though. Very few people, organisations, leaders protect it. I’ve seen designers & builders, including myself, struggle to articulate why something feels right. Why a form needs perceived control or why a certain colour or silhouette just works.
And often, those instincts are second-guessed, debated, or lost altogether. This essay is my attempt to put that feeling into words. Where taste comes from. How it erodes. And why, in the long run, it might be the only real advantage worth protecting.
Taste wasn’t something special earlier. It was just how people did things. You could see it in how homes were built, how meals were served, how letters were written.
Back then, things weren’t made only to be fast or efficient. They were made to feel ‘right’. You could see it in old homes, in the way a staircase turned, in the weight of a teacup, in how music felt un-rushed. People paid attention.
But over the last couple of hundred years, we industrialised how we decide. Workshops turned into factories. Studios turned into offices. And we stopped asking, “Does this feel right?” Instead, we started asking, “Is this scalable?” “Is this efficient?” “Does it follow the process?” We’ve all done it.
The industrial revolution didn’t just change how we made things. It changed why we made them. A carpenter once built a chair for a specific person, with local wood, shaped to fit a real body. Today, we design chairs for market segments that are easy to ship, easy to stack, and good for branding.
That old carpenter didn’t talk about taste as he didn’t need to. He just knew when something was off. When the joint wasn’t strong enough or when the proportion felt wrong. It was a kind of knowing you can’t explain in a deck today. You can’t document it. You can’t train someone on a Notion doc to have that knowing. Taste building is slow and too personal sometimes. Since it was hard to measure, we replaced it with templates and KPIs that we see today.
It happened in schools too. Instead of learning by doing or copying masters, we taught kids to pick the right answer from a list. We trained them to be correct, not to notice. No one asked, “Does this line feel balanced?” That kind of question doesn’t fit on a test.
I’ve worked with incredibly smart people who can ship fast, run great tests, and make clean UIs but even they often end up with things that feel meh! The polish is there. But it doesn’t feel ours.
And because taste takes time and attention, it’s easy to ignore. But when you do, something breaks. You don’t even realise it at first. Everything might look great but nothing feels right. You can see it everywhere. New buildings that all look the same. Apps that are beautiful but somehow tiring. Teams where everyone agrees, but no one’s really alive.
We didn’t lose taste on purpose. We just pushed it aside in the name of speed, scale, and being smart or productive.
And now we have to figure out how to see again.
One of the easiest ways to understand taste is to watch what happens when it’s there and when it slowly disappears.
Dieter Rams never wanted to be famous. He just wanted things to get out of the way. At Braun, he worked in a company that still cared about how things felt. Instead of adding style, he removed noise. His thinking was simple: a good product should be easy to use without making you think about it.
Braun’s tiny white radio T3 had one dial and clear labels. It’s not pretending to be smart. It’s just… right. Clean and quiet. Rams said, “Good design is as little design as possible.” That didn’t mean being plain. It meant being clear.
Now compare that to today’s gadgets. Too many buttons. Fancy lights. Lots of things look clean but feel messy. Rams wouldn’t have approved. You know Rams had good taste not just because of looks but because it still feels right decades later (Severance, Apple, Teenage Engineering). His radios, his shavers, his shelves still hold up. That’s what taste does. It lasts.
That one man’s way of seeing things shaped how most of best tech looks today. Just through having taste and sticking to it.
Take Indian thali vs a Japanese meal for a moment. Sometimes taste looks like maximalism. Sometimes it looks like minimalism. A thali is abundance on a plate. Dozens of flavors. Every dish in its own metal bowl. It’s communal and sensory overload with sweet & sour, crunchy stuff with melt-in-the-mouth dishes. If you notice, here the eater controls the experience of having food.
Now contrast that with a Japanese meal plate. One seasonal vegetable. A bit of grilled fish. A sauce painted with a brush. Every element has their space and the portion is small, but looks high precision. Here, the chef controls the sequence and the eater follows.
Both express taste. But they’re rooted in different philosophies. The important thing here is not which is better. It’s that both are complete eating systems. You can’t borrow a Japanese plate and serve Indian curry. Just like you can’t put butter chicken in a bento box and expect it to land the same philosophy.
The danger with taste isn’t just that people ignore it. It’s that they think they have it when they don’t. That’s why I want to go over two specific forms of taste failure. They are patterns I’ve seen in design, product, writing, and leadership. Once you spot them, you’ll see them everywhere.
Imagine something slowly becoming worse with each iteration (iOS latest version may count). This happens because it’s now maintained by people who no longer understand its original spirit. It’s not always visible at first. A logo gets a refresh. The navigation gets moved. A new design system is introduced. It all feels rational. But after five or six changes, the product starts to not your own. We went through that as well and it’s not uncommon.
Examples:
Instagram’s evolution from simple photo sharing app to a video commerce feed.
Google’s shift from utility to digital billboard.
Netflix thumbnails were once elegant and few but now everything begs for attention.
This gradual drift doesn’t happen because someone made a terrible call. It happens because no one guarded the original taste. Because metrics kept stating “this performs better,” even when the essence was leaking out. Most teams don’t notice it until it’s too late.
Let’s also look at examples where taste collapses. Take Headspace. Beautifully designed, soothing tones, thoughtful UX. But over time, as features piled on with “friends,” “focus music,” “productivity packs,” the original feeling of calm & clarity began to disappear. It still looked right, but doesn’t feel calm anymore. Probably someone asked, “Calm, but make it scalable.”
Or take Google Calendar. It works perfectly. But does it feel like a tool built by someone who deeply respects time? No. It feels like a way to stack meetings until you forget what day it is. A reason why I still miss most of my meetings and rather just rely on things to do at the start of the day and get on phone calls with the folks in those meetings.
You’ll commonly see this in products that feel like they were designed by committee. It’s the difference between something designed by someone with taste… and something designed to look like it has taste.
The problem with taste gradually fading away and taste collapsing is that they’re not obvious. You’ll not catch them in meetings or A/B tests.
Unfortunately, they only show up in the most inconvenient place hardest to articulate: your gut. You notice it when something that used to feel right… doesn’t anymore. When your own product starts irritating you, but you don’t know why.
That’s when you’ve entered a zone metrics can’t fix. That’s when you need taste. And that’s why it must be protected.
People talk about taste like it’s something extra. Like it comes after everything else is figured out. Like it’s only for designers, stylists, or “creative” folks and definitely not for serious people building real things.
But that’s not where taste actually started. I read a bunch and learned that taste didn’t come from museums or design schools. It came from survival. Early humans needed taste to stay alive.
If your tribe couldn’t spot the wrong red on a berry, you got poisoned. If a builder didn’t notice a crooked brick, the house fell. If a parent missed the discomfort in their baby’s face, the fever got worse. Taste was how we noticed something felt off before we had words for it. It was part instinct, part memory. Our gut saying, “This isn’t right.” Thankfully, the gut still works.
Your body still reacts when something feels off. You flinch at a clumsy UI. You hesitate before trusting a product that looks “meh,” even if it technically works. You can’t always explain it, but your nervous system catches it anyway.
Most UX and design training today treat people like machines. Move this here. Change that button color. Add a tooltip. But humans didn’t evolve like that. We notice feelings. Energy. Flow.
In a world full of AI and automation, taste might be one of the few human instincts we haven’t taught machines to fake… yet.
You don’t always notice good taste. But the moment it’s missing, you feel it. When something has taste, every decision feels like it came from the same person even if that person can’t explain why.
That’s what makes taste powerful.
When you use a product built with taste, you feel calm. The colours just work or the words hit right. Nothing feels out of place. You just get it. Like your brain already knows how to use it.
And this isn’t just about design.
A founder with taste runs a meeting that feels sharp but human.
A writer with taste cuts a line that’s pretty but doesn’t serve the piece.
A chef with taste stops before the dish gets crowded. Leaves silence on the plate.
You can fake quality for a while. You can chase trends. You can ship fast. But over time, taste is the only thing that compounds. It makes decisions faster. It cuts confusion. It reduces rework.
If taste is so important and so hard to see, how do you build it? The short answer is that you build it. Slowly. Again and again.
Here are a few things you could do.
1. Make a reference folder
Collect things that make you feel something. Anything. Not what’s trending. What moves you. It could be textures, app UIs, door handles, old photos, sounds, a weird label on a bottle, a line from a book that hits different.
Make a folder. Revisit it every week. Taste shows up in patterns. You’ll only see them if you save and look back.
2. Cross-pollinate
For every one thing you study in your field, study something outside of it. This is probably the most important thing to up skill in after taste.
If you design apps, watch film editing breakdowns.
If you write, read cookbooks.
If you build hardware, follow sneaker design.
If you’re into fashion, study architecture.
These unusual, weird overlaps lead to sharper judgment and your taste gets better.
3. Keep removing
Take something you made and remove pieces one by one. Stop when it breaks and then add just the last one thing back. This usually works.
Most people never do this and stop too early.
4. Trust when something ‘feels’ off
When something feels off even slightly, pause.
If the design feels messy, if the copy doesn’t land, if the hire gives you a weird vibe, pay conscious attention.
Taste usually speaks through discomfort.
5. Make way more stuff
Taste doesn’t grow by thinking. It grows by doing. Write more blogs & thoughts. Design more screens and graphics. Build more things. Break even more pieces of hardware. Sketch more ideas. Then go back. Do it again. And again. And again.
It’s could be the second draft, the 7th version, or the 19th tweak. That one change where your gut finally says, “Yes. That’s it.”
That’s taste.
Taste builds when you obsess over a tiny curve in the product, or a sentence break in UI. It’s your way of telling yourself that the work matters even when nobody’s watching. It’s trusting your own internal tuning fork to say no to what doesn’t meet the bar.
Because in a world that optimises for everything, the only thing that still makes you trustworthy… is taste. That’s what I try to protect in everything I make. You should too.
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Great writeup. Surely, I can afford to build taste and inject it into the products I design. But what happens when data punishes tasteful design choices or when it gets in the way of profits? I am talking about digital products. I think taste requires authorial control to override such compromises.
High resonated with it