Taste gets talked about as if it were a personality trait — something you have or you don’t, like perfect pitch. I think that framing is both wrong and discouraging. Taste is not a gift. It is a compression artifact.
What taste actually does
Watch someone with taste work and the striking thing is what they don’t do. They don’t evaluate every option. They glance at forty possibilities and dismiss thirty-eight before you’ve finished describing them. They aren’t reasoning faster. They’ve compressed thousands of past examples into a model so dense that most options trigger an immediate, accurate no.
Taste is what remains when the obvious options have already been removed — before you consciously removed them.
That instant rejection is the whole skill. Good choices are mostly the absence of bad ones, and the bad ones get filtered pre-consciously by a model trained on a lot of data.
Compression, not memorization
This is why taste doesn’t transfer through rules. You can write down “don’t use more than two typefaces,” but the person with taste isn’t consulting that rule — they’ve absorbed the thousand cases that the rule crudely approximates, including all the cases where breaking it was right.
A rule is a lossy summary someone else compressed for you. Taste is the compression you did yourself, which is why it generalizes to situations the rule never anticipated.
How it’s built
If taste is a compressed model, then it’s trainable, and the training procedure is unromantic:
- Volume of examples. You cannot compress what you haven’t seen. Taste requires having looked at far more than you produced.
- Labeled examples. Looking isn’t enough; you need to know which were good and why, which means feedback, mentors, outcomes, time.
- Production. You sharpen the model by making things and feeling the gap between intent and result.
- Editing your own model. The highest level is noticing when your priors are stale and deliberately retraining them.
Why it matters more now
When making things was slow, taste was a nice-to-have; you only got a few shots, so each was deliberate. When making things is instant, taste becomes the binding constraint, because the bottleneck is no longer production — it’s selection. The person who can generate two hundred options now needs the compressed model that picks the right three. Taste is that model. It was always valuable. It is now the whole job.