Taste Isn't Talent

TL;DR: Real taste comes from seeing a lot of good work over time. The mere exposure effect does something else: it makes your own design feel good just because you have looked at it too long.

The longer you looked at it, the better it started to feel, not because it got better.

Sometimes a designer really does have a better eye. Training can do that. Looking hard at a lot of work can do that. But there is a cheaper feeling that looks similar from the inside. You see the same screen over and over until the friction disappears, and then you mistake that comfort for judgment.

I have had that happen on my own work. A layout starts to feel right because I got used to it, not because it earned that feeling.

A good eye is trained

Paul Hekkert and Piet van Wieringen showed expert and non-expert viewers altered and unaltered post-impressionist paintings. The experts were less thrown by the altered versions. Training had changed what they could tolerate and still judge well.

That matters because taste is not just liking what you already know. In a later study on industrial design, Hekkert, Snelders, and van Wieringen found that novelty and typicality worked together in aesthetic preference. Good judgment was not just “make it familiar.” It was closer to knowing how far you can push before the thing stops making sense.

Dieter Rams is a good example of that kind of training. In the Phaidon book on his life and work, he said of his grandfather Heinrich’s carpentry workshop: “He took great care in selecting the wood he used and shaped and planed it by hand.” That kind of contact trains standards. It teaches you to notice proportion, material, and finish before you ever have a theory for them.

A good eye gets built the slow way. You see a lot, compare a lot, and learn what still holds up when the work changes.

That last part matters. Real taste survives transfer. It helps you judge a landing page, a chair, a package, a dashboard, a book cover. Not because all those things follow the same rules, but because your standards keep getting tested against different forms instead of one house style you already learned to like.

Repetition can fake the same feeling

Then there is the other version. In the late 1960s, Robert Zajonc showed people unfamiliar shapes, faces, and nonsense words. The more often they saw them, the more they liked them. Not because the things improved. Because they got familiar. Robert Bornstein later reviewed more than 200 studies and found the same pattern across images, sounds, words, faces, and symbols. Exposure changes preference even when quality stays put.

This is not just familiarity making your own work easier to read. This is repetition pushing your preference around. The screen starts to feel stronger because you have seen it so many times. The oversized headline. The heavy spacing. The weird button shape. None of it had to improve for your liking to go up.

That is what makes this chapter uncomfortable for designers. We spend more time with our own work than almost anyone else ever will. The same condition that helps us refine details also gives familiarity too much power. If you do not fight that effect on purpose, your eye starts grading comfort instead of quality.

MySpace made clutter feel normal

In 2005, News Corp bought MySpace for $580 million . The platform let people build profiles full of custom fonts, autoplay music, animated backgrounds, glitter GIFs, and whatever else they wanted to throw on the page. To the people living inside that world, it felt expressive. To someone arriving fresh, it could feel chaotic fast.

By 2008, even Wired was describing MySpace as a site with “poor usability, garish widgets and eyeball-melting page layouts.” Ryan Freitas from Adaptive Path said the redesign focus was a “big reduction in clutter and noise.” That is useful because it shows the problem was visible from the outside long before the business collapse finished the argument.

Facebook looked dull by comparison. Every profile had the same structure. No music. No glitter. No neon text on black backgrounds. To people used to MySpace, that could look empty. To new users, it was easy to read. In May 2009, Facebook passed MySpace in U.S. visitors . In 2011, News Corp sold MySpace for about $35 million .

MySpace did not die because of one ugly interface. That would be too simple. But it is a clean example of what happens when a visual culture keeps reinforcing itself until expressiveness and legibility stop pulling against each other.

And once that loop sets in, outside criticism can sound unsophisticated to the people inside it. They think the outsiders just do not get the taste. Sometimes that is true. Sometimes the insiders have simply been breathing the same air too long.

What to test

Ask one question when a design starts to feel good: do I like this because it is strong, or because I have seen it too many times?

You probably will not answer that well on your own, so use a first-timer test. Put the screen in front of someone who has never seen it. Give them half a minute and ask what it is for and what stands out first. If their read is flat, confused, or just different from yours, that should carry more weight than the warm feeling you built up after a week in the file.

I think comparison helps more than introspection here. Put your screen next to three things you respect that solve a similar problem. Not to copy them, just to break the closed loop you built around your own file. Mere exposure gets weaker the second another standard enters the room.

Real taste carries across projects. Repetition does not. Repetition just makes you loyal to the thing you kept seeing, and if you have been looking at it too long, it gets hard to tell which one is talking.