The Value of Design Taste

Have you wondered why people at the top of their careers just know when something looks right or is done? Working on Meta Quest OS for the past five years has made me obsessively curious to better understand this intuitive sense—let's say "taste" ability that guided so many of my design decisions.

By taste, I mean that trained eye for detail, proportion, and readiness that many mistake for natural talent but in my experience is just a collection of obsessively practiced visual skills. I led and participated in many quality initiatives at Meta where documenting and articulating quality gaps helped me, many times, to win arguments with product managers, design directors and VPs.

I also go back to the pixel perfect era, where I used to be able to look at a screen and know when something was off by a pixel. It felt the same as walking into a room and instantly noticing a crooked picture frame or a newly-added object (that somehow most people seem to miss).

Where does this come from? Many assume it's an innate gift you're born with, but I've seen differently. Is it genetic? Maybe. But can it be deliberately developed through specific practices And in an age where AI can generate perfect compositions in seconds, will human taste—this cultivated sensitivity to what works, when and why—be the key differentiator? Understanding the origins of aesthetic judgment might help us answer this question.

The evolution of aesthetic judgment

Before the 17th century, the concept of beauty was typically considered precise— mathematical principles of harmony and proportion rather than personal preference 1. The ancient Greeks weren't debating if the Parthenon looked good; they were calculating its proportions to ensure it adhered to existing "universal" principles of beauty, golden “nature” rules, etc.

While the Greeks saw beauty as objective, my experience shows that recognizing these 'objective' principles requires a lot of training. During the middle ages, with the influence of theology, mathematical precision was “relaxed” to accommodate religious narratives and symbolism. During the European Enlightenment, taste (from the Latin 'gustus') was formalized as an aesthetic decision-making tool. Hume's 1757 essay "Of the Standard of Taste" argued that while taste appears subjective, some judgments are more valid than others, suggesting that refined taste could be developed through experience and comparison—something I've found to be true in my design career.

Today, aesthetic judgment reflects not only precise proportions but also a proper integration of experience, cultural context, and personal choices. The ability to “just know” when something looks right is built on years of aesthetic inquiry, refined through years of practical application, leading, over time, to instant subconscious pattern recognition.

Neuroscientific research has revealed that aesthetic judgment engages multiple brain networks rather than a single 'taste\beauty center.' When we evaluate visual aesthetics, the brain activates regions in the visual cortex alongside the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, which integrates sensory information with emotional value 2. And finally, neural pathways can physically reorganize with repeated exposure and practice—connections used frequently become strengthened while unused ones weaken 3.

An interesting curiosity is that our auditory system seem to have evolved to flag harmonic alignment (dissonance) as a significant event (clearly notable in a non musical scenario) while our visual systems prioritize an overall interpretation of the composition, often ignoring minor details. Which makes sense when you consider evolutionary aspects where detecting predators in low-light situations is more important than visually noticing that the same predator is a bit more to the left of your view.

We may be born with certain predispositions—twin studies suggest some aesthetic preferences have heritable components 4 —however rewiring neural pathways to make better, more detailed aesthetic judgments is not only possible but becomes an important professional skill for designers.

How I accidentally trained my design intuition

Looking back at my own path, I realize how much of my design ability to notice was shaped by seemingly repetitive and boring early experiences with personal computing. The first time I got my hands on a personal computer was in 1997. And I quickly became fascinated with Paint. As a kid I always wanted to draw, but never found the right mentor or class for it, and Paint opened the door to execute some of that drawing that was anxious to get out.

A little personal detour is that at this time my mother was into cross stitch embroidery and I somehow thought of adding images to Paint and zooming in to see its pixel grid. It was a fun trick to replicate what appeared (for others) to be complex embroidery. I wish I had called it pixel art at the time! Maybe this was my initial accidental foundation into noticing.

In the 2000's, there were a lot more applications to be aware of, and I discovered Corel Draw and Photoshop (also Cakewalk, but that's a story for another time). As my teenage and young-working-adult years progressed, while friends were out socializing (dating?!) or playing video and board games for hours, I was obsessively learning all I could about these image softwares, composing and manipulating images, creating precise masks, and removing objects from backgrounds—and it is scary that AI can do all of that today do in seconds.

Each of these was developing different aspects of my taste: masking taught me about edge perception and transitions, composition work trained my sense of balance and visual hierarchy, and color manipulation refined my understanding of harmony and contrast. It's strange to think about how much time I invested in skills that are becoming increasingly automated. But was that time wasted? No way! Because what I was really doing (and had no idea) was rewiring my visual perception.

It is fair to mention that not every designer finds the same satisfaction in noticing these details or feels the same discomfort when something is slightly off. And comparing designers with same amount of years of experience I've often wondered why some develop this refined perception while others don't. The only assumption I can make is about quality rather than just quantity of hours invested in practicing.

Around 2006, when I started working with web design (remember Flash websites and those 640px width centered iFrames?), there were no design system or efficient hand-off tools for engineers. Design implementation meant extra hours of hard work (and pizza! And bad filenames!) ensuring that what was coded matched my Photoshop files as closely as possible. Over the next three years or so, this developed into what I can only describe as a hyperawareness of visual precision—I could instantly spot when something was just one pixel off after a design hand-off.

Today, this trained eye has become second nature and continues to echo into non design specific skills. I walk into a room and immediately notice misaligned elements or slightly off-center objects that somehow escape others' attention. And cultivating this detail-oriented awareness transfers to other aspects like quickly sensing when experiences have too much friction or doubtful usability, even before I can consciously express the why.

I've come to believe that developing taste in design begins with a focus on layout (grid, spacing, hierarchy, etc). There's something about quickly noticing how individual elements relate to each other spatially that seems to underpin what we refer as visual design intuition or the general sense that a piece of work is ready. And when you start to notice all the little details of actual products (production code, not Dribbble or portfolio images) layout issues are usually the ones in needing more correction.

This focus on "layout" trains what design theorists call "gestalt perception"—the ability to perceive a unified whole rather than just individual elements 5. And yes, I think using this term is appropriate here, because it captures exactly what happens when a designer develops a greater sense of composition.

However, we can't ignore the fact that focusing the training on all “little” details surrounding layout properties is also important, given that our visual systems are not naturally tuned to it. We seem to mistakenly attribute talent to some mysterious innate gift, when in reality, it's just hours of practice (however one gets it).

So how do you actually develop this sense? Here's what I did (and still do).

  1. Consistency: Remember those 365-day design challenges? They work! Really! I essentially did my own version of this 20 years ago by spending hours every day in Photoshop. The consistent, repetitive practice of making visual decisions rewire those neural pathways.
  2. Copy, Adapt, Translate: Countless of these hours were spent trying to replicate (or adapt to my own reality) award-winning websites or graphic designs on platforms like Awwwards or magazines like Archive. This exposure to established high-quality design and the practice of copying forms helps calibrate your internal standards. It didn't matter in this case that some of these references weren't really solving user's problems but focusing on winning awards.
    • You should also study other disciplines like architecture, art, and industrial design—fields that have been thinking about form and function far longer than digital design has existed and that are also way harder to change (can't quickly deploy a new version of a building, right?).
  3. Feedback loops: Some of my biggest growth moments came from brutal but honest feedback from senior peers. And sometimes just observing really good people perform their craft and noticing the why's and how's. Having someone point out when your carefully crafted design doesn't quite work forces you to reconsider your intuitive judgments, specially in a paid job situation.

Early in your career, these practices might seem like a set back from quick advancement or financial reward. I remember wondering if all those hours in Photoshop would ever pay off, but I've found that this foundation of taste has become more valuable over time, not less—especially as new tools have made technical execution more accessible.

Taste in the age of AI

In an era where AI generates "perfect" designs in seconds, what role does human taste play? I believe it becomes more important, not less. As Jaron Lanier notes, what is often labeled as AI is essentially a reflection of human-created data and algorithms, reinforcing the idea that such systems process rather than originate culture. 6.

When I tried AI design tools, they produced generic results reminiscent of bootstrap-era websites. They follow design "rules" but lack understanding of how humans actually interact with interfaces. AI is advancing quickly, but the question isn't whether it will improve—it's whether taste requires lived human experience (and biology) that machine pattern recognition alone can't replicate.

If taste is learnable, couldn't AI develop it through training? The difference is in how we learn. Humans develop taste through embodied experience—physically interacting with designs and feeling emotional responses. While AI might eventually simulate taste through increasingly sophisticated pattern recognition, it may always be a different kind of aesthetic intelligence than human taste.

Maybe in the future (probably not so distant from 2025) AI will do 80% of the design work and humans 20%. And if you have been working with design for a while, you know that the final 20% can be excruciatingly hard to manage and execute, depending on the complexity of the project. The final push often involves the subtle refinements that elevate good design to great design—refinements that require a developed sense of taste.

As AI systems advance, I suspect the knowledge workers who will thrive won't necessarily be those with the most technical skill, but those who have developed the most refined taste—the ability to make nuanced and durable decisions that align with specific requirements, while maintaining aesthetic integrity, over time.

This isn't just about noticing when something looks "pretty"—it's about developing an integrated sense of when design truly works across many dimensions by looking at it for a few seconds and the ability to articulate the why's when questioned.

For those early in their design careers wondering if it's worth investing time in developing taste rather than just learning the latest tools or techniques—I'd say emphatically yes. The tools will change (dramatically, as Sketch and Figma did over Photoshop and as we're seeing with AI), but the ability to make good aesthetic and functional judgments will only become more valuable.

Design education often focuses on strategies and tools, but rarely addresses detail-oriented practices explicitly. The designers I've seen excel at taste cultivation have adopted specific habits: maintaining inspiration collections they regularly analyze, practicing 'before and after' critiques of their own work, and deliberately studying designs across different domains. These practices aren't typically taught in school but are far more valuable than another software certification or design methodology.

Articulating reasoning behind aesthetic decisions is a key differentiator as designers progress through their careers and a portfolio that demonstrates taste evolution over time, not just final polished pieces, can differentiate you in job interviews or present a nuanced narrative. Positioning yourself as the 'taste maker' between technical teams and business stakeholders can create unique value as technical execution becomes increasingly automated.

What aspects of your design practice are currently developing your taste, even if they don't seem immediately productive? Are you taking the time to train your eye, or are you rushing to produce without reflection? The designers who will shape our future aren't just the ones who can execute well—they're the ones who know, at a glance, when something is ready.

Footnotes

  1. "Golden ratio - Wikipedia." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_ratio ↩

  2. "Beauty and the brain: culture, history and individual differences in aesthetic appreciation." PMC. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2815941/ ↩

  3. "Neuroplasticity: How Experience Changes the Brain." Verywell Mind. https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-brain-plasticity-2794886 ↩

  4. "Innate and learned components of human visual preference" Science Direct. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960982299803066 ↩

  5. "Gestalt psychology - Wikipedia." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gestalt_psychology ↩

  6. Jaron Lanier. https://www.newyorker.com/science/annals-of-artificial-intelligence/there-is-no-ai ↩

Images & words by Bruno Marinho