Taste is a hot topic right now. Designers are being told taste is their best defense against the AIpocalypse. At the same time, the creators of AI creative tools (at least the ones who aren't happy to just serve out slop 4 cash), are trying how to make models tastesful.
Taste is the magical protector of designers and the equally magical differentiator of tech tools with a bias toward the mediocre. I get asked a lot—both by worried creatives and creatively-challenged technologists—how to build taste.
But what is taste, even?
I have a working definition of taste that I think can help us demystify it. And if you or your product are a little tasteless, maybe it will give you a path to better taste.
It’s a bald-faced paraphrasing of psychology research that defines creativity as the optimal balance of novelty and appropriateness for the task.
I think you can define taste as applied domain knowledge appropriately applied to the situation.
Domain knowledge
In video editing, this is color, type, sound and motion design, etc. But this model could be used to understand how some people write “more elegant” code than others.
Domain knowledge is like a pyramid.
1. Descriptivism: the “what”
The base is descriptivist. If you ask someone what “good” is, they will give you examples. Maybe a couple of formal qualities they use to recognize quality. If you stop here, you're a consumer with some taste. Knowing it when you see it is not the same as knowing how to make it.
This is, however, the easiest way to move the aesthetic output of AI. I suspect long term, it's is a bad route to taste because it moves its own goal. If you're successful as an AI creative tool, the volume of using your tool to create expose its aesthetic tells—like a Claude website or ChatGPT illustration—and it becomes bad taste through its ubiquity.
2. Mechanics and heuristics: the “how”
The middle is a mix of mechanics and heuristics. People usually start to build their taste beyond exposure to examples of good along one of two paths:
Mechanics. They see what’s good and they learn the technical mechanisms used to create it.
Heuristics. They learn the “rules” that govern good. Now what is good is contextual and they are taught culturally (pin in that), so the rules are more heuristic than programmatic. (Less Set headlines at 72 points, more Use a consistent typographic scale so variation looks intentional and creates visual rhythm.)
3. Semiotics and cultural context: the “why”
Toward the top, you have semiotics, this is the why behind the rules. It’s things like Gestalt principles, color psychology, human behavior. It’s how you know whether a font is masculine or feminine where before you had to rely on heuristics. This is usually where you can start to do things that are legitimately interesting.
At the top is cultural context. Taste is a form of social currency or a ticket of admission to certain in-groups. Is animal print fun or gauche? Depends on who you ask.
Some of the import forms of context in media are norms and precedent.
Norms tell us what’s professional, cool, offensive to different people.
Precedent is what’s already been done and exists in the culture’s shared knowledge.
References to precedent influence the perception of your “application of domain knowledge” whether intentional or not.
Intentionally applied references can make something feel “fun and retro,” while applied unintentionally makes it feel “old-fashioned or dated.”
Appropriate application
So all of this domain knowledge lives in the creator until it’s applied to a creation.
Our ability to apply domain knowledge also runs on a gradient.
1. Recognition
We can think of zero as recognition. At zero, you wouldn’t recognize good if it bit you.
Demonstrating a recognition of good is a stepping stone and worth a little (not the full price of entry to the in-group).
2. Craft
Then we have craft the ability to execute polished work from a technical perspective. Craft is the application of mechanics and heuristics; but it can operate independently from the why layer, which when something looks good, but doesn’t work.
If someone is all style and no substance, you wouldn’t say they have good taste.
3. Strategy
This is where being able to understand the “why” helps creators apply domain knowledge not just to a deliverable but to an outcome.
Often, this comes from combining their media design domain knowledge with adjacent knowledge about their audience, field, or industry.
It’s what elevates a video to a story and motivates viewers to respond (however the creator intends).
4. Innovation
Advanced domain knowledge application leverages novelty. Creator’s combine materials in unexpected ways or introduce new materials and techniques. They make interesting and less expected connections between cultural references, stylistic movements, and their subject. They start to change or challenge norms through their work.
The motivating engine: critique
How do people build domain knowledge and their ability to apply it? Exposure, sure, and practice (repetition), obviously.
But criticism is one of the most important exercises creators go through as they develop taste. Creative critique is different from review or QA where you’re looking for objectively correct actions or mistakes to correct. (That gets folded into professional design crits, but it’s not the gauntlet that traumatized art students that real crit is.)
Creative criticism is a more rigorous analysis of the mechanical and cultural aspects of the work that assesses them against the creator’s intent. It’s also a dialogue. Creators need to listen for feedback and ideas that will improve their work, and defend their decisions against people with differing taste or alternative solutions. (Even when the creator considers the work “done.”)
Self-critique is a form of metacognition. It’s not just verifying the completeness or accuracy of your own work. You’re comparing what you’ve created to your original intent and reflecting on the process you took, your confidence in the decisions you made, and thinking ahead to what you will do differently the next time.
This process of doing and reflecting on loop is how you build your creative domain knowledge and your ability to apply it—taste.
