On Taste, Part 2
Start with Part I.
Many years ago, when you were still new to the profession of design, you sat around a table squinting at a monitor. On the screen was somebody else’s life’s work displayed as a series of screenshots wrapped around an HTML shell. This was your first portfolio review, a tried-and-true tradition where once a week, a handful of designers at your company gathered to peruse the portfolios of other designers—applicants and acquaintances and artists whose work rose to the surface after many hours of scouring the nooks and crannies of the Internet.
The process was simple enough: start with the week's list. Pull up each candidate's portfolio one by one. Peruse. Discuss. Decide if we should reach out. Rinse and repeat.
Right. Easy. Except for one little problem: you had no idea how to decide.
Oh sure, the bad was easy. Those were always the quickest. You know it when you see it. Overly complex wireframes. Polished projects that look like wireframes. Comic sans not used ironically. Similar to how nobody would mistake the new Hansel and Gretel movie as an Oscar contender, a portfolio that's far off the mark doesn’t need a lot of deliberation.
The good, on the other hand, was the hard part. A number of portfolios that looked strong to you didn't always meet the bar for the person sitting next to you. In fact,sometimes it was rare for any portfolio to make the cut of some folks in the room. Which was tough, because that meant what, exactly? That you had low standards? That you weren't critical enough? That your taste sucked?
But hold up. Isn't taste subjective? Who's to say “X has good taste”, and “Y doesn't”, when what we're talking about is something that cannot be measured or formulated or proven? Design is a creative endeavor, after all, and like art or music or literature or fashion, every single one of us is equipped with our own personally-expert opinions on the matter. So how can there be a notion of right and wrong?
Still. We celebrate the “best of” in every creative field with annual awards. We have experts who give talks and write books and are endlessly retweeted. We listen to the reviewers and critics when they tell us where to eat and what to watch and how to spend our hard-earned money (not on Hansel and Gretel, apparently). There is a cultural zeitgeist that we all subscribe to within each field, some vague consensus around which things are ‘incredible’ and what things are ‘pretty awesome’ and what things are merely ‘good.’ No, you can't define opinions as right or wrong, but you can’t deny the concept of influence. And having influence—having impact with your work and your ideas—is why good taste matters.
There is a simple rule-of-thumb you've discovered that approximates your level of taste. You call it the understand-the-experts test. It’s pretty self-explanatory: for any given field, do you understand why the people you admire have the opinions they do on what’s good and what isn’t?
You don’t necessarily have to buy their opinion 100%. You just have to understand. Well enough that you can engage in a discussion with them when you disagree. Well enough that they respect your point of view as much as you respect theirs.
To be honest, you have no idea how Oscar nominees are chosen. Certainly, the lot tends to be movies you enjoy watching, but you'd be hard-pressed to proffer an argument for why Django Unchained is on this year’s list for Best Picture but Moonrise Kingdom isn’t. And, really, how come Christopher Nolan isn’t ever a Best Director nominee? That guy makes some damn entertaining movies.
And so it was at your first design portfolio review. You couldn't always understand why some people at the table felt that certain portfolios shone brighter than others. Why some work lacked refinement. What made one student's typeface stronger than another's.
Your taste needed to improve.
Luckily, as you've also come to learn through the years, such a thing is possible.
Continue reading Part 3.
