What nobody taught you about taste

Software and tutorials have made design accessible to everyone, but the ability to use the tools is no longer what sets a designer apart. In a world of infinite production, the real differentiator is the judgment to know why work matters.

There's more design in the world right now than at any other point in history. More logos, more brand identities, more packaging, more content. The tools are better and cheaper than they've ever been. And yet, the more there is, the harder it is to remember any of it.

Technical proficiency no longer sets anyone apart. What's become rare, and much harder to teach, is the judgment to recognise what good actually looks like. Not just executing a brief competently, but being able to tell the difference between work that functions and work that means something.

It’s worth asking how we got here.

The school problem

Design education made a quiet deal with the job market somewhere around the turn of the century, and the terms weren't great. As tuition costs climbed and the pressure to justify an arts degree intensified, graphic design programmes started positioning themselves almost entirely around employability. Portfolio schools appeared promising job-ready graduates in a fraction of the time. Traditional four-year programmes began trimming art history, critical theory, and anything that couldn't be directly translated into a case study. The pitch became: learn the tools, get the job.

Which is understandable, honestly. Students have rent to pay. But something got lost in that trade.

The Bauhaus, which remains the most referenced design school to date, largely because nothing since has quite matched its ambition, gave students physics, materials science, human anatomy, and art history alongside their craft training. Gropius' founding idea was that you couldn't separate the hand from the mind. The curriculum treated design as an interdisciplinary practice, not a technical service. Today's equivalent often reduces it to a sequence of software competencies and project briefs optimised for a LinkedIn portfolio.

Michael Bierut wrote about this in 1989, which tells you the conversation isn't new: "Nowadays, the passion of design educators seems to be technology; they fear that computer illiteracy will handicap their graduates. But it's the broader kind of illiteracy that's more profoundly troubling." Designer Kathy Pham made the same argument, noting that liberal arts unemployment sits at 3.8%, lower than graphic design at 5.7%, which is not the statistic the portfolio bootcamps tend to lead with.

The result is graduates who can execute but haven't been given much to say. Technically fluent, culturally thin.

The reference problem

The self-taught path into design has become a real one, and it's complicated. The issue with it is that there's a difference between seeing a lot of design and actually understanding it.

A designer today can move through thousands of images in a single afternoon across Instagram, Pinterest, Behance, Dribbble. The volume of visual input is extraordinary. But volume isn't depth, and exposure isn't context. Knowing that something looks Swiss grid is different from knowing what the International Typographic Style was responding to, what problem it was solving, why it worked then and why it still works now. Without that, references become a library of surfaces. Useful for matching a mood, less useful for generating one.

Elizabeth Goodspeed, who writes about design with more clarity than most, describes taste as something built through wide, deliberate exposure to things outside your own field. The architect inspired by nature, the fashion designer inspired by medieval tapestries, the illustrator who spent three years obsessively collecting French basketball magazines from the 1970s. The through-line in work that has a genuine point of view is almost always an eclectic, personally curated diet of references rather than a narrow, field-specific one.

The algorithm doesn't help here. Recommendation systems are built to show you more of what you already respond to, which is the opposite of the friction that builds range. A feed curated entirely by engagement optimisation will make you very good at knowing what's trending. It won't necessarily help you develop the judgment to assess it.

The AI problem

This is where it gets more interesting, or more complicated, depending on how you're feeling about it.

Generative AI has done something remarkable: it's made visual production available to essentially anyone. A usable logo, a styled illustration, a polished layout no longer require years of technical training. That technical moat that used to protect designers has largely gone. We've watched it happen and we're not going to pretend otherwise.

What AI produces, though, is not taste. It's an optimised prediction of what a visually acceptable output looks like, based on the vast average of everything it was trained on. A 2025 study published in PNAS found that when AI image generation systems run in iterative loops, all trajectories converged toward the same small cluster of dominant visual motifs. Twelve recurring patterns with what the researchers described as "commercially safe aesthetics." The model wasn't producing diverse creative output. It was gravitating, every time, toward the statistical centre of its training data.

Which explains quite a lot about what a lot of things look like right now.

None of this is an argument against using AI tools. The argument is more specific: a tool that produces the median is only useful to the extent that the person holding it has the calibration to recognise when the median is wrong. Goodspeed puts it well: AI image generation is essentially a truncated exercise in taste. Knowing which inputs to feed the machine, and having the eye to identify which outputs are actually any good, that's still entirely on you.

Why it matters beyond aesthetics

It would be easy to frame this purely as a cultural concern, a worry about visual homogeneity and the general texture of the world. Those things are real, but there's a harder commercial argument here too.

McKinsey's Design Index tracked 300 publicly listed companies over five years and found that top-quartile design performers saw 32 percentage points higher revenue growth than their industry counterparts, and 56 points higher total returns to shareholders. The companies being rewarded weren't the most polished. They were the most distinctive. The ones whose design was legible as an actual point of view rather than a competent execution of category norms.

In a market saturated with AI-generated work that confidently executes the average, being genuinely different is a positioning decision as much as a creative one. Chobani moving from tech-minimalism to folk illustration. Burberry returning to heritage typography after years of chasing the same trend-led sans-serif that every other luxury brand had adopted. Neither of those was an AI-assisted decision. Both required someone with enough cultural range to read the room and enough confidence to act on what they read.

Taste is not innate

Taste tends to get discussed as though it's either innate, something you're born with, or inherited through the right kind of privileged education. Neither is really accurate. It's built, slowly, through deliberate exposure and a certain amount of stubbornness about following your own curiosity rather than the feed.

In practical terms, that means building a visual archive that isn't just contemporary design. Art history, architecture, film, fashion, photography, graphic design from other countries and other decades. Not to copy from it, but to build a mental library rich enough that you develop an instinct for when something is working and when it isn't. As Nielsen Norman Group noted, in an era where anyone can technically produce a visual, selection and discernment are what make a designer's judgment worth having. The craft of design is increasingly the craft of choosing, and you can only choose well from a position of genuine knowledge.

There's something else worth saying here, which is that taste develops partly through dissatisfaction. Through making something, recognising it's not right, and having enough of a frame of reference to understand why. A designer whose visual diet is narrow finds it harder to feel that gap. A designer who has spent time genuinely looking at a wide range of work, curious rather than just efficient about it, has more to triangulate against.

Beyond execution

Design has a production problem and a taste problem, and they're not the same thing. The tools have largely solved the first. They've made the second more visible.

What's scarce now isn't technical ability. Most designers can execute. What's harder to find is the judgment to know what should be executed, the cultural grounding, the historical range, and the personal point of view that allow someone to make a considered choice rather than an average one. That doesn't come from better software or a sharper prompt. It gets built over time, through wide reading, deliberate looking, and a willingness to spend time outside the feed. Not the most convenient answer, but there it is.

Sources:

https://www.itsnicethat.com/articles/pov-graphic-design-schools-are-teaching-tech-not-taste-creative-industry-150426

https://www.itsnicethat.com/articles/elizabeth-goodspeed-column-taste-technology-art-280224

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12827715/

https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/tech-and-ai/our-insights/the-business-value-of-design

https://www.nngroup.com/articles/taste-vs-technical-skills-ai/