Most people think taste is something you’re born with. You either have the eye or you don’t. It’s a convenient belief. If taste is a gift, you’re off the hook for not having it. But that belief is wrong.
I’ve spent 20 years as a creative director. My entire job is professional taste. Clients don’t pay my agency for software or hours. They pay for judgment, the ability to look at two options that seem identical to everyone else and know, with confidence, which one is right.
Nobody in my industry likes to admit this, but that ability is trained. It comes from reps. And you can do the reps on anything you care about: watches, cars, interiors, the way you dress, the pitch deck you’re about to send. Taste transfers, because taste is really just one skill: knowing what good looks like and being able to say why.
That skill is a cheat code right now, and it’s getting more valuable, not less. Everyone has access to the same tools, the same trends and the same AI spitting out infinite options. When everyone can make anything, the advantage goes to the person who can tell which anything is worth making. Taste is the moat.
So, here’s how you can actually build this skill. It doesn’t require a personality transplant, but it does require drills.
1. Raise the quality of your inputs
Your eye is a mirror of what you feed it. If your visual diet is whatever the algorithm serves you, your taste will be algorithm-average, which is another way of saying you’ll like what everyone likes, slightly after they like it.
Creative directors curate their inputs on purpose. Go look at the best version of the thing you care about, not the popular version. If you care about watches, stop scrolling drops and go study the pieces that were considered perfect 50 years ago and still are. If you care about interiors, look at rooms photographed before staging became an industry. You’re building a reference library in your head. Every judgment you make later gets checked against it.
This means consuming less of what’s easy. Average inputs produce an average eye. There’s no workaround.
2. Move from ‘I like it’ to ‘here’s why’
This is the single biggest jump. Most people’s taste vocabulary is two words: fire and mid.
When something stops you, interrogate it. What specifically is working? The proportions? The restraint? The one unexpected detail in an otherwise quiet design? Say it out loud or write it down. It will feel pretentious for about two weeks. Then it becomes how you see.
I do this in the room with clients constantly. Anyone can say a logo feels off. The person who can say the letterspacing is fighting the weight of the mark is the person who gets paid for their opinion. You don’t need my vocabulary. You need your own, and you build it by forcing yourself past the vibe and into the why.
3. Pay attention to what you envy
Envy is embarrassing, which is why it’s useful. It’s the most honest signal your taste produces.
When you see a guy walk in and something in you flinches, don’t scroll past that feeling. Study it. Usually it’s not the watch or the jacket. It’s that everything agrees with everything else. Nothing is shouting. That’s the data. Your envy is showing you the gap between the eye you have and the eye you want.
4. Kill the almost-good
Most people’s taste dies at the moment of execution.
There’s a famous idea from Ira Glass about the gap. When you’re developing taste, your eye improves faster than your output. You can see that what you made, bought or chose isn’t quite right, and it’s painful, so most people either quit or lower their standards until the pain stops.
Do neither. The willingness to kill something that’s almost good is the whole difference between people with taste and people with opinions. I’ve thrown out work the night before a presentation because it was strong, but strong wasn’t the job. Return the jacket that’s 90% right. Repaint the room. Almost good is the most expensive thing you can tolerate, because it occupies the space where good was supposed to go.
5. Compare, side by side, constantly
Taste is not built in the abstract. It’s built in comparison.
Put two things next to each other and pick one: two typefaces, two navy suits that look identical online or two floor plans. Then articulate why you picked it, using rule two. Comparison is where your eye actually calibrates, because it forces a decision instead of an impression. Museums are free. Showrooms are free. You can do this everywhere, every day, and it costs nothing but attention.
The part nobody tells you
Do all five drills, and you’ll have a trained eye. Congratulations. You’re now halfway there. Taste is pattern recognition plus courage, and the second part is where almost everyone folds.
A trained eye will regularly tell you things the room disagrees with: that the safe choice is wrong, that the thing everyone’s wearing this year is already dead or that your own project, the one you announced, needs to be redone. Taste without the nerve to act on it is just private suffering. You see what’s right and choose what’s approved.
And here’s the trap: Most people’s version of courage is copying someone else’s bold move. Everyone trying to stand out the same way disappears together. The whole point of training your own eye is that it gives you your own answer, not a braver version of everyone else’s.
So start small, but start acting on your eye. Wear the thing your trained taste chose and your insecurity questioned. Send back the work. Be the hater. Say, “This isn’t good enough yet, and here’s why.”
That last part, the here’s why, is important. Anyone can have standards. Design literacy is being able to defend them.
Train the eye. Then trust it in public. Let them call you a hater.
That’s the cheat code.