Training Taste

Taste lives on both sides of creating anything.

It is there before an idea becomes visible, and it is there after the first version exists. Before the colors, lines, words, layout, or structure are put on paper, taste is the intimate work happening inside. It is your thoughts, feelings, references, instincts, and creativity trying to imagine how something might come together. It is the choices being made before anyone else can see them. What should this feel like? What is the right direction? What belongs here? And more importantly: what does not?

Then you make the thing. You lay it out, write the first draft, put the idea out into the world in some rough form. And once it exists, taste shows up again. Now, how does it make you feel when you look at it? What feels close? What feels wrong? What would you remove? What would you keep even if someone else questioned it? That is your taste.

But good taste is harder to define. It is deeply personal, but it is not only personal. You have yours. I have mine. We all carry different references, preferences, experiences, and ideas of what feels beautiful, useful, clear, or interesting. At the same time, taste does not exist in a vacuum. Something can feel right to you and still fail to resonate with anyone else. Something can be personally meaningful and still not work for the audience, the market, or the moment.

That is where the difference between personal taste, market taste, and trends becomes important. Personal taste is what you are drawn to, what you notice, what you believe is worth making or preserving. Market taste is what people are already responding to. It is what earns attention, trust, desire, action, or memory in the real world. Trends are the surface layer. They can show you what people are noticing right now, but they are not the same as taste.

If you only follow your own taste, you can become self-indulgent. If you only follow the market, you become generic. If you only follow trends, you can end up copying the shape of something without understanding why it works. The work is learning how to embrace both your own filter and the outside world at the same time.

Good taste is what happens when your private filter creates shared recognition. It is not an objective truth, and it is not just whatever the largest number of people like. Not everyone has to like it. That is not the point. But the right people see it and feel that it works.

That does not mean chasing approval. It means testing your instincts against reality. Does it resonate? Does it feel clear? Does it earn attention or trust? Does it create the feeling or action you hoped it would create? That is where taste becomes more than preference.

And taste is not only about creating things. It is also about judging what already exists. You use taste when you decide what looks good, what feels honest, what sounds right, what seems cheap, what earns trust, what feels forced, what deserves attention, and what should be ignored. Creation is one way taste becomes visible, but judgment is where taste is trained.

That is also why keeping your taste sharp takes both creation and observation. You have to actively use your own creativity. You have to make things, revise them, sit with them, and notice what your instincts are telling you. But you also have to pay attention to the world outside your head. You have to notice what is working, what is converting, what is getting attention, what people trust, what they ignore, what they share, and what they remember. Taste gets sharper when your internal filter stays in conversation with the external world.

For me, a lot of my work is helping people confront challenges, shape ideas, and make decisions. Building websites on the side lets me practice that same work in a concrete way. Someone gives me a product or service, and I have to understand it. I have to research what is working in that industry, what is getting attention, what is converting, and what the customer already believes or wants. Then I have to take that understanding and turn it into something on the page: words, flow, design, positioning, feeling.

Once it is there, I have to judge it. Does this feel honest? Does this feel clear? Does this make sense? Would I trust this? Would the right person care? Does this version make the decision easier, or is it overcomplicated and confusing? That process is taste in practice.

I think this is one of the places where AI makes the question more interesting. AI can help us make more things faster. It can help us draft, design, test, remix, and produce at a speed that used to be impossible. But because it can give us so much so quickly, judgment matters even more. You must slow the process down, think deeply, reflect, and ask yourself if this version is really worth keeping. Is it polished? Is it true to what you meant? Would it actually work for the person receiving it?

Slowing the process down is the most practical way to train taste. Pay attention to your reaction at the moment of choice. When something looks good but feels empty, notice that. When something is technically correct but sounds like anyone could have made it, notice that. When a version feels close but not quite right, do not skip past the discomfort. Ask what is missing. Ask what is being flattened. Ask whether the work became clearer, more useful, or only smoother.

The same is true outside of AI. If a website makes you trust a company faster, ask why. If a sentence makes an idea feel obvious, ask what it removed. If a product feels premium, cheap, generous, lazy, sharp, or confusing, pay attention to the signals. Taste is trained by making those small judgments consciously instead of letting them pass as vague reactions.

That is the human part of the equation. I do not think it goes away. If anything, it becomes more important. Because when everyone can make more, faster, the edge is being able to slow down, dig deeper, know what to discard, and know what is good enough to keep.

Thank you to Ana Bugalete for contributing to this essay.