Taste in art and design is commonly called subjective, but history tells a different story. The frameworks that shape what we call “good” are built by centuries of debate, critique, and cultural evolution. What feels intuitive is often the product of deliberate choices, repeated until they become invisible.

Historical Views

From salons to subreddits, taste has always been a moving target. David Hume saw it as a skill, honed by exposure and education. Kant believed taste, though personal, could be guided by principles like harmony and balance. Pierre Bourdieu reframed it as a tool of social distinction, more about cultural capital than innate perception.

These perspectives reveal a tension: taste is both personal and collective, shaped by individual experience and the gravitational pull of community.

Key Principles

Behind every “just right” composition or color choice, there are patterns, balance, proportion, the play between minimalism and maximalism. Color isn't just a visual tool, but a carrier of mood and memory. Typography sets the tone before a word is read.

Even when taste feels like instinct, it's often the result of these structures at work.

Trends flare and fade. What lasts is work grounded in fundamentals, composition, hierarchy, clarity, yet open to reinvention.

Taste in Motion

Taste adapts. Baroque drama gave way to modernist restraint, then to postmodern irony. Each movement was as much about its moment as its style.

Today, digital culture accelerates this cycle: platforms amplify certain aesthetics, algorithms remix them, and what's new becomes old in weeks.

In product design, this means balancing usability with character, resisting the urge to chase novelty for its own sake.

Cultivating Taste

Taste isn't inherited. It's built, by studying, experimenting, analyzing.

Anyone who says taste can't be taught is lying.

The most resonant work often comes from those who look beyond their own era, borrowing, remixing, questioning what's considered “good.”

Training the eye means noticing why some designs sing and others falter. It means caring about hierarchy, readability, and emotional resonance, not as rules, but as tools.

There's a multitude of resources available now, everything is so accessible.

Browse Cosmos, Pinterest, Twitter, Instagram, digest critically acclaimed media, engage with diverse perspectives and always be curious.

Your mind should be a repository of the world, able to connect ideas and concepts across disciplines.

Da Vinci had a notebook filled with sketches and ideas, a testament to his relentless curiosity and desire to learn. If the greatest minds in history were committed to lifelong learning, so too should we be.

Taste lives in the space between feeling and form. The best work balances personal intuition with structures that guide attention and evoke response. It's not about erasing subjectivity, but about channeling it through principles that endure.

What Endures

Taste is never just about what you like. It's the intersection of memory, culture, critique, and craft. For designers and artists, the challenge is to move between tradition and invention, to create work that feels both timely and timeless.

The result isn't just work that catches the eye. It's work that stays with you.