Good Taste
Cultivating good taste in a world full of hackery and knock-offs.
Steve Jobs was legendary for his willingness to forego buying furniture rather than furnish his home with sub-par design.
Elon Musk is known for obsessing over the tiniest details of his products, to the point where he once scrapped a Tesla sun visor because the seam on the fabric looked “fish-lipped.”
John Lasseter once persuaded Disney to allow Pixar to start over on Toy Story, even though the first half of the movie was finished, because the film wasn’t as good as it could have been.
To most of the world, this level of passion reads as eccentricity.
What’s different about those people? What makes somebody willing to jeopardize an entire project over details so small that nobody else will notice? Some people would say craziness, or drive, or even a warped sense of reality. Perhaps it’s just good taste.
People like Jobs and Musk and Lasseter don’t seem to live in the same world that we do — they live in the world as it could be. They recognize the potential for things to be different, and get frustrated when the rest of us don’t immediately see that.
What is Good Taste?
Good taste is the ability to recognize true quality — the kind that goes beyond the superficial, and demonstrates craftsmanship in both the idea and execution. It can identify when something is not just well-made, but well-considered.
Lots of people try to fake it. We’ve all seen wantrepreneurs and junior designers acting pricklier than necessary, trying to come off as an eccentric genius. (It’s usually because they’ve just finished reading the Steve Jobs biography.)
Good taste is more than just a set of rules to follow. Anyone can complain about Comic Sans and Papyrus, but it takes a well-cultivated eye to understand why they’re poorly executed. Anyone can follow the rules, but only an expert understands when to break them.
It’s easy to fake good taste when its precepts are popular. By now, everyone knows to make fun of Comic Sans. Mocking is a destructive action, however, and it’s always more difficult to construct than to destruct. True genius is often derided in its time. How many people misunderstood Frank Lloyd Wright when he began his work? Or van Gogh? Steve Jobs was forcibly removed from his own company before anyone realized that his best was yet to come.
Cultivating Good Taste
Good taste can’t be faked, but it can be cultivated. We are what we consume. Spend more time around true quality, and eventually its hallmarks will seep into your own work.
(Sidebar: I spend a lot of time browsing Dribbble. I wonder if that’s made my work more superficial than it could be?)
Of course, when we’re new to something, we don’t know what we don’t know. We should seek out guidance from those who are more experienced than us — they’ve been down this road before, and know where the pitfalls and opportunities lie.
When I was new to web development, I spent a lot of time browsing W3Schools. Had I sought guidance from more experienced front-end workers, I would have known to find better resources. It was only by stumbling upon A List Apart and engaging with that community on Twitter that I was saved from a catastrophic misunderstanding of design.
The internet has made both good and bad resources more accessible to us. Thankfully, it has also made it easier to reach out to experts and seek guidance as to what’s quality and what isn’t. We can all cultivate good taste by finding those with expertise in their domain and exploring the resources that they find valuable.
All this leads me to the question that all of us should ask of ourselves: Do I have good taste? I wonder if any of us would recognize it if we did have it. I suspect that, the better-cultivated a person’s taste, the further they think they have yet to go. Only the arrogance of naïveté can trick someone into thinking they’ve already arrived.
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