I’ve been refining this blog’s design for two decades. With each new version, I get a little better at knowing what I want.
Turns out, my designs tend to get simpler with time. At this point, it’s all typography and negative space. I got better at knowing what I value and what I can take away.
Uncluttering brings joy. Maybe that’s a deeply human thing?
Obsession and Preference
Spend enough time with anything, and you’ll develop strong opinions about it. You become obsessed with the details. And everything is somebody’s obsession.
Sneakers. Mechanical keyboards. Coffee.
Watch enough movies and you might start analyzing Dutch angles and obsessing over color grading. You start noticing subtle issues in pacing. You’ll recognize the same actor in different roles, even if they’re just a random extra.
Once you start seeing nuance, you can never unsee it. You’ve developed a strong personal preference.
But at this stage, you’re just a guy with an opinion.
Good Taste
Having preferences isn’t the same as having good taste.
Preferences are just opinions. Good taste is about recognizing quality outside your own preferences. It’s seeing how something expresses an idea through deliberate choice, and being able to tell when those choices are honest.
Good taste is rooted in context. It requires understanding the history and craftsmanship behind a thing. Without that, recognizing quality flies right by you.
Taste and Expertise
Good taste and expertise are siblings. Both come from caring deeply. Both require knowing why things work. Both demand awareness of the effect each decision has.
But they’re not the same. Taste is recognition. You can have taste in something you can’t make yourself. Expertise is production. You can be an expert in something whether you have taste or not.
What’s interesting is how often one drags the other along. People with taste care so much about the details that they eventually start making the thing themselves. And experts who care about their craft tend to develop taste as a byproduct.
Trigger
Take Willie Nelson’s guitar, Trigger, a 1969 Martin N-20. Out of context, it’s just a worn-down chunk of wood. It might equally be the guitar of a busker. But after 10,000 performances, it has become a part of Willie Nelson.
He could have bought a new guitar a hundred times over. He didn’t. He developed such a strong taste for the sound he wanted that he refused to settle for anything less than Trigger. The same repairman has maintained it since 1977.
Willie demands control over his sound, because the details are what shape it. He didn’t do anything out of the ordinary. He just did the ordinary so well that it became extraordinary.
Is it Willie who shaped the guitar, or the guitar that rounded Willie’s sound? They aged together. They’ll die together.
If you watch an artist like him perform, it looks effortless. That’s because he knows what matters and what doesn’t. He focuses on the details that make a difference and ignores the rest, which makes the task simpler for him. That’s the trick: good taste tells you what to leave out.
You Can’t Buy It
Buying an Apple device doesn’t mean you have good taste. Millions own them. For many, it’s just a status symbol. Apple helps you think different in the same way that Air Jordans help you jump higher.
In fact, people with good taste often avoid brands. Brands are what kill great products.
The cycle goes like this:
- Someone creates something great.
- Early adopters rave about it.
- Popularity grows.
- The product gets adjusted for the mass market.
- Quality drops.
- Early adopters move on.
Most products are built for the average customer, so most products settle for average quality. We can’t be experts in everything, so we trust what others say, then wonder why most things suck.
We sense when something’s sub-par, even if we can’t put our finger on it. That’s a little tragic.
Brands don’t care about quality or being honest. They care about money.
The Algorithm Problem
It’s harder to develop a unique taste today. We’re surrounded by feeds and algorithms that show us only what we already like. Without exposure to things we don’t like, we can’t discover the things we do.
If we get too comfortable, we stop developing taste at all. Our preferences become narrow, superficial, shallow. We just like what everyone else likes, with no way to say why.
What Now?
The way out is to care about something. Anything! Care so much it becomes part of who you are.
Everyone should have at least one thing they irrationally obsess over. Something they know inside and out. It makes for a more interesting personality. A richer life.
Humans socialize over shared obsessions. We bond over espresso grinders and motorbikes. Suddenly, you can connect with a stranger.
When you create for others, your taste becomes visible. It shows who you are and what you care about. That’s scary. But it’s how you find your people.
I don’t think I will ever stop refining this blog’s design. It is my zen garden. Now go out and build your own.