On “taste,” now hiring

Some design job listings now ask, without irony, for an arbiter of taste. I read one aloud in class. A student asked what everyone in the room was thinking: “Can you actually learn that? Or do you just have it?” It is the question I am asked most often, in different costumes. “Is design talent?” “Am I visual enough?” “Some people just see it, right?” And it usually comes from the students who are most worried that they don’t. For years I gave a diplomatic answer. I am now prepared to give a less diplomatic one.

Taste is not a gift. It is a habit that looks like a gift from the outside.

The people who seem to “just see it” are not seeing something hidden from the rest of us. They have looked at more things, for longer, and asked themselves why more often. What looks like instinct is mostly accumulated attention, compressed until it feels immediate.This matters more now than it did five years ago. A student can generate forty layout variations before I have finished my coffee. Producing options is no longer the hard part. It is not quite design. Not quite decision. It is supply.

The hard part is choosing one, and saying why, out loud, in a sentence that someone else can disagree with.

That last part is where taste lives. Not in “I like this one,” which ends the conversation, but in “this one works because the hierarchy tells you where to go first, and the other three make you choose.” The first is a preference. The second is a position. Positions can be tested, argued with, improved. Preferences can only be defended. So when that student asked if taste can be learned, I said yes, but not in the way people hope. There is no lesson on taste. There is only the slow, unglamorous practice of noticing, naming, and explaining, repeated until the explanation arrives before you look for it. The listing was right about one thing. When everyone can make forty options, the valuable person is the one who can tell you which one, and why. I would just add that this person was not born. They were made, mostly on Tuesdays, mostly by paying attention.

Margin note: This week, every time you catch yourself saying the first sentence, try the second.
“I like this one.”
“This one works because…” The second is slower. That’s the point.