Taste Isn't Talent

TL;DR:
You think taste is something you either have or you don't. It isn't. Taste is built through deliberate exposure: looking at a lot of things, with attention, over time. The designers you admire didn't arrive with a good eye. They developed one.

You have a colleague who just has it. Their work lands. Their choices feel considered without being obvious. When there’s disagreement in a review, people tend to defer to them. And somewhere, not in public, you’ve wondered whether you have that same thing. Whether it’s something you were born with or somehow missed.

That belief, that taste is a quality some people have and others don’t, is what keeps you from building it.

The eye learns what it sees

In 1980, the psychologist Robert Zajonc ran a series of experiments that changed how researchers think about preference. He showed people unfamiliar shapes, Chinese characters, and photographs of strangers. Some images appeared once. Some appeared many times. At the end, he asked people which they preferred. The answer, without exception, was: the ones they’d seen more. No conscious reasoning. No evaluation. Just exposure, producing preference, below the level of awareness.

Zajonc called it the mere exposure effect, and his finding has been replicated hundreds of times since. Robert Bornstein’s 1989 meta-analysis of 208 studies found the effect held across images, sounds, tastes, and people. Every time, familiarity pulled preference toward it. The mechanism is almost too simple. Your brain interprets what it recognizes as easier to process, and what is easier to process feels better. Reber, Schwarz, and Winkielman called this processing fluency: the sensation of smooth cognitive work that the brain codes as aesthetic pleasure. The more you see something, the more natural it feels. After a while you stop noticing that it feels natural at all, and you start calling it taste.

The problem is that all of this happens without you doing anything. Mere exposure is passive. It builds preference without building judgment.

What experts actually see

The psychologist Paul Hekkert spent the 1990s studying how people with different levels of expertise in the visual arts look at paintings. What he found wasn’t that experts liked more things. It was that they saw different things. In a 1996 study comparing non-experts, design students, and senior art students, Hekkert and his colleague Piet van Wieringen found that experts placed far more weight on originality, meaning the degree to which a work broke from convention in a meaningful way. Non-experts evaluated paintings on whether they liked the subject. Experts evaluated them on what the work was doing. In a follow-up study, the correlation between originality and quality was .88 for experts and .40 for non-experts. Same paintings. Two separate things being seen.

What this means is that expertise, in the visual domain, is about what you can see. Not what you feel. Experts have spent enough time looking at enough things that they’ve built categories non-experts don’t have yet. Those categories let them perceive complexity that’s invisible to everyone else. It’s a bit like how a chess grandmaster reads a board in a different way from a casual player. Not more pieces, just more patterns. The eye isn’t a neutral sensor. It pattern-matches against everything it’s already processed. Show it a narrow range of things and that’s where it gets stuck.

K. Anders Ericsson spent decades studying expert performance across music, chess, sports, and medicine, and the through-line was always the same. In his 1993 paper with Krampe and Tesch-Römer, he made the case that elite performance has nothing to do with innate ability. It comes from a specific kind of practice: focused, effortful, with attention directed at what you’re getting wrong. Not just doing the thing. Attending to it. Asking why. Which sounds obvious when you write it out like that, but most designers don’t do it. A designer who looks at a thousand pieces of work and a designer who develops taste are doing different things. The second one is actually thinking while they look.

The carpenter’s grandson

Dieter Rams grew up during the Second World War, in a household disrupted by his parents’ separation and the general disorder of postwar Germany. He spent long stretches of his childhood in his grandfather Heinrich’s carpentry workshop. Heinrich Rams worked alone. He had no machines. He rejected them. Lovell’s biography records Rams saying:

“He took great care in selecting the wood he used and shaped and planed it by hand.”

— Dieter Rams, cited in Lovell, 2011

Rams would later say he didn’t register this at the time. He said as much in interviews. But something stuck. Selection mattered as much as execution. Things should be plain and straightforward. Care was a practice, not an attitude.

Before finishing his design studies at the Werkkunstschule Wiesbaden, Rams interrupted them to complete a three-year carpentry apprenticeship. When he arrived at Braun in 1955 and became head of design, the aesthetic he brought wasn’t assembled from design school. It had been building for years: time with the Ulm School’s rigorous functionalism, watching engineers approach problems, a grandfather who treated wood as something worth thinking about long before anyone asked him to design anything.

The ten principles didn’t arrive. They accumulated. What looked like an innate gift for restraint was the residue of a very long education in what restraint costs.

Widen the diet

Most designers draw from a shallow pool. Dribbble, Behance, Twitter. The same apps they use every day. The same fifty studios they’ve been following since design school. There’s nothing wrong with any of those sources on their own. But when that’s the whole diet, the eye only gets better at recognizing things it’s already seen.

Architecture teaches proportion and the logic of constraint in a way that screen work almost never demands. Typography teaches hierarchy and tension at a level most product designers never reach. Film teaches timing, and what it means to let something breathe. These aren’t analogies. They’re domains with hard-won solutions you can bring back across the fence. When you build new categories from outside your field, you start to notice things in your own work that weren’t visible before. Not all at once, but the shift does come, and then you can’t unsee it.

Pick one reference each week that sits outside your usual reading: a building, a piece of furniture, a film sequence, a book cover. Spend twenty minutes actually looking at it. Ask what it is doing, what it is responding to, what it refuses to do. Not as a formal exercise. Just as a habit you keep.

Rams spent decades building his eye before anyone was watching. Most designers never start doing that.