Taste is the ability to:
Most people consider taste to be a pre-ordained gift: you have it or you don’t. This chapter faithfully disagrees and treats it as a skill with parts.
Once you can name the parts you can see them in other people’s work.
And once you can see them you can practise them in your own.
The definition has three verbs. Each one is a separate ability, and people are often strong in one and weak in another. Someone can see every flaw in a layout and still be unable to decide what to cut. Someone else decides fast and confidently, but about the wrong things.
All three verbs draw on a fourth thing: a library of everything you have seen, made, and studied closely. The library is what you compare against. The work you make goes back into it.
The first part of taste is resolution. Show a beginner and an expert the same two things. The beginner sees two of the same. The expert sees six differences and already knows which two matter.
You cannot judge a difference you cannot see, so everything downstream depends on this. A lot of what looks like “good instincts” is really just higher resolution: more categories, finer edges between them.
Resolution can be learned, and faster than most people expect. Much of what an expert sees comes from knowing which few details to check first.
Each word is set twice. Is it one typeface both times, or two different ones? Answer all five.
Answer all five first.
An a or a g can be drawn with two bowls stacked or with one. Two faces rarely disagree on this by accident.
Geometric faces draw the O as a true circle. Most others squeeze it into an oval.
Compare the sides of the O with its top. Some faces swing from heavy to hairline; others keep the stroke almost even.
One face can be set heavier or with looser spacing. If every shape matches, it is one face in two settings.
Five new pairs. Same question.
Resolution is not only about type. A cook tastes the missing pinch of salt. An editor hears a sentence that runs one beat long. A tailor looks at whether the checks line up at the pocket before noticing anything else about a shirt.
Two shirts from the same cloth, which is the more expensive one?
Sometimes the gain in resolution comes from a better way of comparing, not sharper eyes. In 1930 an astronomer found a planet this way.
Two photographs of the same patch of sky, taken six days apart. Stars stay put. One dot moved. Click it.
The planet was on both plates all along. What found it was a reference to compare against and a quick way to compare. That reference is the library, and section 4 comes back to it.
Seeing a difference is not the same as knowing whether it matters. Judgement asks one question: better for what, and for whom? Every judgment of taste is relative to a purpose, an audience, and a setting.
This is why there is no such thing as a good typeface, a good colour, or a good word in the abstract. There are only good fits.
None of these ten treatments is bad on its own. Each one is right for some job. Judgement is knowing which job you’re in.
Judgement is also what separates taste from preference. Preference is a report about yourself. Taste is a claim about the work and the person on the other end of it, which means it can be argued with, tested, and wrong.
Taste only becomes visible in decisions, and most of those decisions are subtractions. In a room full of people adding ideas, the person with taste is often the one asking which of them to remove.
Choosing also means committing. A choice made halfway, such as a colour that is almost bold or a joke that is almost funny, reads as no choice at all. Conviction is part of the skill.
Every fact on this poster matters. Most of everything else is competing with them. Choose the edits you would make.
You can only notice a difference you have a reference for. The library is the stock of references behind all three verbs, and it has two dimensions. Breadth lets you borrow from other fields: a chef who looks at architecture plates food differently. Depth gives you the fine resolution of Fig. 1.2, in one field.
The library grows from attentive exposure. Scrolling past ten thousand images builds less than studying a hundred closely enough to say why each one works.
Taste tends to move through three stages, and the strange thing is that the first and last look alike from a distance.
Beginners make simple things because they don’t yet see the options. Then they learn the options, and for a while they use all of them: more ornament, more effects, more references, often as proof that they know. Experts come back to simple, but it is a different simple. Every decision has been made, and most of them are invisible.
The default font, typed and left. Simple, but nothing was decided.
Every technique they know, used at once. Five typefaces, a badge, wheat, stars, and a founding year of last year.
One mark, two weights, one colour. It looks as easy as stage one. It took longer than stage two.
One more pattern matters for anyone learning. Taste grows faster than skill. For years you can tell your work is not good enough before you can make it better. The radio producer Ira Glass described this gap as the stage most people quit in. It is a sign that your taste is working, not that your ability is missing.
You cannot see taste directly. You can see what it leaves in the work. Seven signs show up again and again, whether the work is a chair, a paragraph, an app or a meal. Each one comes with a quick test you can run on anything, and a figure to try it on (Figs. 1.12 to 1.18).
The tone, weight and form match what the thing is for. A tasteful thing never feels like it was designed for some other occasion.
TestDescribe the situation in one sentence. Does the work feel like it belongs in that sentence?
ElsewhereA dark suit is right for a funeral and wrong for a beach wedding. A tasting menu served at an airport gate has misread the moment, however good the food.
The parts feel like they were made by one mind with one idea. Nothing contradicts anything else, so the whole thing reads as a single gesture.
TestCover any one element. Could you guess what it looks like from the rest?
ElsewhereA restaurant where the plates, lighting, music and menu all speak the same language. A novel whose narrator’s voice never drifts.
Emphasis goes where it matters and nowhere else. If everything is loud, nothing is.
TestSquint until the details blur. Is there still one clear place your eye lands?
ElsewhereA plate with one star ingredient and everything else in support. A speech with one line people repeat afterwards. A building whose entrance you find without a sign.
Nothing is there out of habit, fear, or decoration. Economy is not the same as minimalism: a rich thing can be economical if every part of the richness is doing work.
TestRemove an element. If nobody would miss it, it shouldn’t have been there.
ElsewhereA three-ingredient pasta that tastes complete. A remote with five buttons where others have forty. A eulogy that runs four minutes.
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Taste shows up at the scale people don’t consciously notice: the back of the drawer, the spacing in a footnote, the weight of a door. People can’t name it, but they feel it as quality.
TestLook at the smallest, least visible part. Was it decided, or left as it came?
ElsewhereThe underside of a well-made chair is finished. The sound a car door makes when it closes. A hotel that remembers how you take your coffee.
Generic work could be swapped for its competitor without anyone noticing. Tasteful work carries details that belong to this subject alone: its real materials, real numbers, real habits.
TestSwap in a competitor’s name. Does the work still make sense? If so, it is generic.
ElsewhereA menu that names the farm the tomatoes came from. A wedding toast with a story only the speaker could tell. A house designed around the tree already on the site.
Good taste is not timid. It takes a risk, but usually just one, and it makes everything else quiet so the risk can land. Surprise everywhere is noise.
TestPoint to the boldest choice. Is it one thing, and is everything around it helping it?
ElsewhereA classic dish with one unexpected ingredient. A plain white house with a red door. A conventionally cut film with one long, unbroken shot.
Two of those signs do most of the work of telling good taste from its near misses: how bold the work is, and how well its choices agree. Put them on two axes and most work falls into one of four corners.
A few things get mistaken for taste often enough to name them.
Money buys materials and time. It doesn’t buy judgement. Plenty of costly things fail every sign above.
A trend is someone else’s choice, worn without their reason. It lands in the right corner of the map by accident and leaves when the trend does.
Less is one style. A children’s book, a festival, or a spice market may need more. Taste knows when more is right.
Taste serves the person on the other end. Snobbery uses it to rank people. The first is generous, the second is not.
Every part of the loop can be practised: seeing, judging, choosing, and building the library. That is what the rest of this book is for.
Taste is the ability to notice the differences that matter, judge them against what the thing is for, and choose with conviction.