Developing Taste

benoq

Articles like these are trite bullshit. Loads of great talent across the greater world of art that goes unrecognized. Nobody would call it good taste because hardly anyone can recognize it as such. Taste doesn’t matter when slop puts food on the table. Write the article you’d rather write: how to make money. That’s the main slant here of wanting to have differentiation. “Taste” was a marketing tool by Jobs telling people what they wanted to hear. This is why it’s called people management. You calibrate output based on input. If someone is receptive to being complimented, you give them a compliment while taking their money. Don’t beat around the bush.

kevinlanducci

I appreciate this perspective. Currently reading "On Writing" and would argue that Stephen King's perspective would be pretty similar to what's laid out here: surround yourself with good influences and your work gets better, and dissect why something is good (or bad). Another point which may apply is to purposefully engage with work you don't like, because if you can figure out why it sucks, it'll help you make work that doesn't suck!

fasterik

I've always been a fan of Paul Graham's essay, "Taste for Makers". It's arguably more relevant today than when he wrote it in 2002. https://paulgraham.com/taste.html

airstrike

people say taste is the differentiator but I hate that because taste is personal, whereas culture is communal taste without curation for the community, with an eye to what is culturally edifying, is just consumerism

xnx

Almost universally the worst designs come from designers. Example: only someone who fetishized design would make a keyboard the didn't work just so it could be a mm thinner. The best designs come from those who interview, research, and test with a broad and representative sample of real users.

random3

all the enterprise was missing, all along, was taste

ww520

Taste is overrated. Taste is an excuse for gatekeeping and a tool for exclusivity. Your work won’t fly because it lacks taste, whatever that’s it, defined by whomever.

joduplessis

This article is filled with pseudo self-help advice for people who now think they need taste to level-up their the LLM skills. > it’s a trained instinct. The ability to see beyond the obvious and recognize what elevates. It’s why some designs feel effortless. This is not really what "taste" is. Some designs feel effortless because someone practiced/trained so they could execute on their taste. Taste is extremely cheap - execution is still very hard.

jmathai

Exposing yourself to great taste educates AND inspires. I love Peters Design Company and how amazing they are at identity branding. Here's an example of rebranding Uhaul. https://www.youtube.com/shorts/cMU0G8h0pys

Animats

This is just the intro. If you keep on with the following articles, they're about visual effects for stacked notification popups. They have good visuals, but if you have a stack of open notifications, something is wrong. If you have enough that you need a stack, users are going to want some way to put them in bins, order them, and generally manage them as a to-do list, like emails. At that point, they're not notifications, they're incoming messages. No more than N% of the time should a notification be pending. Probably under 5%. Otherwise a notification is the wrong tool for the job. You need an inbox.

spencermacbeth

One of the biggest risks and sources of frustration in AI-native teams is an over-emphasis on taste leading to a doom loop where people (usually with product backgrounds new to the engineering mindset) spin their tires taking big swings unsystematically and without defining a clear exit condition. I hope we as a community can develop the new agile or some sane process to ground ourselves in sooner than later...