Curating taste

In my first design job, I vividly recall asking our Director of Design what to look for in candidates when I was interviewing. The director’s answer stuck with me. He said to look for taste. I asked for clarification, and he told me to ask questions that get to the heart of what inspires them. Questions like “What apps do you think are really well designed?” or “Who’s your favorite designer and why?”. He went on to explain that it’s very easy to teach a new designer how to use a design tool or learn a design system that reflects the product’s brand. What you can’t teach is taste. Taste was something that, according to him, is something that you just innately have and cannot curate or suddenly acquire over a short timeframe. He wanted to know if these potential designers have good taste, because if there were signs that they had it, chances were strong that they would try to emulate their own taste in their work.

This led me to introspect further about my own taste and what it meant for my work. Did I have good taste? Was I trying to infuse my designs with my taste, even if subconsciously? I obviously appreciated good design when I saw it. My answers to questions like what my favorite app was at the time would have been something like Citymapper. I really enjoyed how it was designed for multimodal transportation and how it encouraged walking by displaying the amount of calories burned. The answer to who my favorite designer is would’ve been Massimo Vignelli, and how his designs for the New York MTA or the National Parks brochures manage to emphasize clarity and simplicity while utilizing extremely rudimentary design principles. I also in general appreciated how a product like the Nest thermostat set out to solve an invisible problem and made the solution feel so effortless while integrating itself so seamlessly with the existing HVAC infrastructure.

So how did this so-called taste that I had manifest itself in my work? Well, it didn’t. Most of my work seemed to be focused on client needs and product requirements, not so much putting my own personal taste out into the world. This is where I ran into some philosophical debates with our Director of Design at the time. He had a fine arts background and wanted to bring that into the world of design. He believed that taste is an essential component of making every work of design feel unique and special. He was right to some extent, but most of the job that is working as a designer in tech comes down to problem-solving, not so much curating taste.

And so it never really mattered much at my job for a while. It didn’t matter what I enjoyed or what I thought was well-designed. I always tried to mimic the basics of a simple, understandable interface and tried to combine that with an effortless user experience in all my work, but that’s a base-level expectation of every designer. It would be weird if a designer didn’t try to do that. But as time went on, I definitely started to notice it. When I’d compare my work to that of other designers at the company, I could start to see it. My work often involved very simple and linear designs, so basic and straightforward that some would often mistake them for wireframes that haven’t been taken to high fidelity yet. I would use grayscale or monochromatic color palettes whenever I could. I would remove all unnecessary styles and visual elements to only preserve the most essential content on the screen. When I saw other designers’ work, they would always have interesting illustrations or graphic elements to complement their typographic choices or presentation. They always had influences and inspirations of where those came from and what they meant. And then it hit me. The simple, straightforward, minimal approach to design was my taste.

All or most of my work reflected this. It may have been subconscious at the time, but I felt that any unneeded visual elements on the screens just distract from the content. The user is here to accomplish a specific task, so let’s just let them accomplish that task and not steer their attention away with stylistic elements that, even if they served a purpose of symbolizing a brand value, just felt like they got in the way. There were situations where differentiating the product with a specific style or brand was a direct ask from the client (likely due to them wanting to use visual design as a brand differentiator in a competitive marketplace), and lo and behold, those projects slowly started to get delegated to other designers at the agency instead of landing at my plate. I think the design leaders at the agency recognized my strengths in wireframing, prototyping, and clearly communicating product values and so they gave me more of those projects, while being aware that graphic design or brand identity wasn’t my strong suit. And that’s fine. I didn’t need to be good at all aspects of design, and I looked up to the other designers at the agency who were better at those things than I was. I liked learning from them and observing their process, secretly wishing that it could be a thing I could be good at someday.

Now the real question is: does having good taste successively lead to being a better artist or graphic designer? I can totally see the importance of it. I see these designers quoting the perfect symmetry of a Wes Anderson film frame or talking about the clean geometry of the Golden Gate Bridge when they cite them as inspirations for a certain design. But you also need to apply it in a way that’s specific to that project and context at that time. Many of the designers at the agency would collect moodboards or pages and pages of inspiration. This is where my process differed from many of the designers at the agency. I would find a few references that mimicked my preferences for a simple, intuitive experience and just model my designs off of those. There were some designers that would spend hours and days researching colors, typefaces, and layouts before starting to work. This is where their taste came in. They would meticulously filter out hundreds of viable color palettes and narrow it down to a few that could work, all based on instinct that came from a taste that they have refined over the years. They would toss out some seventy typefaces, all of which would’ve worked just fine with the design to the untrained eye, just because they didn’t like how the ascenders were too short on one typeface or how the ligatures made the kerning look off in another typeface. This is the kind of design work that I love to obsess over in my own side projects or personal work, but when it comes to real projects, I would much rather spend my energy on asking bigger questions about the product and what problems it’s really trying to solve. Because if there’s a mismatch there or I don’t fully understand the goals of the product, it doesn’t matter how beautiful my fonts are or how my chosen color palette is evocative of a seaside resort in Monte Carlo.

This strategy has so far worked out pretty well for me. In almost every scenario, working on edge cases and trying to figure out how to reduce or remove the friction in a given flow is far more impactful to the end user than spending that time trying to evoke a certain feeling in them. My motto has been that the best feeling they can get is the one where they accomplish what they were trying to do without any confusion or misdirection. I still try to embody my taste for Vignelli’s simple grid layouts and try to encourage good habit-building in products I work on (akin to Citymapper calorie burn estimate for route planning), but they’re all usually a subconscious or passive afterthought baked into the work after the primary and secondary goals have been accomplished. I like to add those things into it, but only after the crucial goals of the design feel like they’re being hit.

So I’ve been wondering how, if at all, my taste can manifest more actively in my work. I do work on some personal projects from time to time (when inspiration strikes) and I do tend to be way more active in trying to make them feel like it’s something I worked on, rather than just any other designer. My inspiration comes in waves and it usually has to do with the video game that I’m playing at the time or a movie that I really admired the visual design of. For instance, recently loved the visual depiction of the Time Variance Authority in the Loki TV show, and got inspired to make some random office poster for it. Another inspiration is a video game I played called Control, which has such a striking style in its architectural design that it encouraged me to think more about what my take on it would be like.

I also tend to read and watch lots of behind-the-scenes interviews and documentaries about game design and the creation of new worlds in general. One thing that’s always stood out to me is how the creators are always citing influences that inspired them in their work. This is their personal taste coming through in the project, their meticulous refining and fine-tuning their inspiration moodboard to figure out how they could incorporate or combine certain elements of the influences to create some wholly original and unique. It makes total sense to use taste in this context, since the “problem” you’re trying to solve here is how to create a special and memorable world.

I recently did an activity to try and figure out what my “taste” is. It asked me to list out what my favorite pieces of media, film, TV, games, books, etc. are. Why did I enjoy them as a viewer, reader, or player? What did I like about them? What aspects of them stood out to me as something truly creative? Well, the results were interesting. My mooboard here consisted of the movies Arrival, Interstellar, and Moon. TV shows included Dark, The Twilight Zone, Twin Peaks, and Stranger Things. Video games included Control, Observation, Returnal, Prey, and Oxenfree. Books included Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach Trilogy and Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series. If you’re familiar with any of these works, you can probably see the patterns. I’m very into strange “new weird”-esque worlds where you’e not entirely sure what’s happening and the media you’re consuming seems to be playing tricks with your mind. They’re sometimes but not often set in space and may or may not involve extraterrestrial beings. Aside from these, I also generally enjoy artsy movies and games. Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom or The Grand Budapest Hotel are a visual feast, the animation style in Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse is nothing short of incredible, and Laika’s hand-crafted claymation props in Kubo and the Two Strings or The Missing Link are just unbelievably good. Games in this artsy space include experiences like Gris, Journey, Oxenfree, Monument Valley, and Alto’s Osyssey.

These are certainly a selection of genres that I greatly enjoy, and I’m now trying to break down what exactly I admire about them and why they work so well. This is a very active method of curating my own “taste” so that I can start to infuse some elements of it in my work. Obviously, it won’t show up in my day job, because something tells me that intentionally obscuring the user’s goals or playing tricks on their mind when they’re trying to pay their bills on their banking app or trying to call a Lyft isn’t exactly going to go down well. There may be something interesting to play with visually in terms of symmetry and aesthetics though. I’m hoping to bring some of this into my personal projects. I’m enjoying learning about worldbuilding and what it takes to create a believable space that feels “lived-in”. I’m trying to take notes from things I’ve enjoyed to tastefully layer the world with interesting stories, things, and memories. Not entirely sure where this will take me or what will come out of it, but I thought it was an interesting experiment to try and intentionally figure out what my “taste” was and see how I could apply it to my own work going forward. Keep an eye out for some truly weird personal projects down the line, because once I dip my feet into this strange world, I have a feeling I’m going to go all in. Perhaps it’ll even lead me to reach out to my old Director of Design again for a spirited conversation about whether or not taste can be curated, ending the debate once and for all.