The Daily Sprint

More Than Taste

How are your design tastebuds? We’ll discuss what it is, and why you need to be concerned with far more than taste.

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Welcome to The Daily Sprint, where today is a great day to design.

How are your design taste buds?

Do you have good taste?

Do you have bad taste?

Should we even be talking about this thing people are calling taste?

We'll talk about what it is and why you need to be concerned with far more than taste.

I'm Darrell Estabrook 30 years into UX product design.

Yes, tastes may change, but the way we go about design hasn't, but I'm still just getting started.

I'm also the founder of designing a platform for product designers who want to design with a why.

I coach designers into leaders through real time, interactive product specific guidance.

Find out more and get on board with a free newsletter at designy.com

So welcome.

It's episode 18.

You can believe that.

It's a lot of weeks.

We do it once a week, but the daily sprint happens for you every day.

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Really appreciate it.

So taste, what is taste?

It's popular.

It's a popular term.

It's not a new term.

The funny thing is I never really heard it applied to product design until this year.

It's popped up, especially if you're on LinkedIn, anywhere that comments are posted, you'll find taste.

And it's usually just been a cultural reference, like about style, you have good taste.

That's a good thing.

Great.

And we move on to something else.

But it's now this professional thing.

Or at least it's in the spheres I'm in.

And what's going on with it?

So, I think I've seen it in correlation with a lot of talk about AI.

It's funny because everyone is trying to justify the plunge into AI.

There's so many posts about just, it's revolutionizing everything that a designer has ever done forever, which, okay, those are fine, but it seems like you see this posted with AI is fine, but you still get to need taste.

You're still gonna need judgment.

You're still going to need these things.

I think every designer knows deep down that AI is not actually designing.

It really takes away your ability to think and create over time.

It's being handed to you with some prompting, you feed it in this information and will get a result that's been already thought through.

And in the sense, the greatest sense of the word, it's, it's just being handed.

I mean, that's that's ultimately it.

So the justification is to use AI, you still need taste, but what does that mean?

What is taste?

I think the internet is using taste as an instinct for refined product.

Like, that would be the definition.

So like if you're making dinner and you open up a box of mac and cheese, that wouldn't be refined in the sense as in you made the pasta, got 3 different kinds of cheeses and graded them and heated them in a certain way, added other ingredients. You know, the right temperature, the right timing.

And then you put it together, you all together balance the flavors.

Like that would be refined.

That, you know, you have good taste in mac and cheese.

But if someone was making an app, you know, kind of the same correlation, maybe if you just use the out of the box elements, just the default HTML, you know, it wouldn't be refined, so to speak, unless as opposed to using typography and color and composition, you know, and then, of course, laying things out in a certain way, over a workflow, you know, that would be refined.

I mean, art fashion, cars, interior design, all of these have a sense of taste, right?

There's a refinement that's there.

But that doesn't, that's not really, the thing, right?

I don't like the term, because it's very subjective.

It's my taste or it's your taste, right?

I like this car.

We can all agree that this car, if you own this car, you have good taste.

But that's not what we're doing.

In fact, that's not what any of that is doing.

Ultimately, the taste is like a lagging indicator.

It's really, are you recognizing design, right?

That someone has put the care, like the mac and cheese, into all those aspects of producing this thing in a structured way that has a result that is definitely refined.

It's on purpose.

It balances, it blends well together.

And you recognize that.

And some people recognize it instinctively.

Some people don't care about it.

I guess there's one side of the spectrum, but if you do recognize it, yeah, that's like a level one, if you understand why it is the way it is, you know, you're getting more into the mind of the designer, you maybe you appreciate it at some other level.

And we're not doing subjectiveness in this.

This isn't just, oh, that was so and so's preference, and therefore, it worked out well, and we just like that.

Now, I think every creative effort that exists is not subjective, right?

Opinion really doesn't have anything to do with it.

It's always about purpose.

Right?

Are you communicating the message effectively or not?

And when I say message.

I mean, if it's a car, there's a message there.

There's a purpose for that machine and all different aspects of it.

It's not just to get you from A to B. That is part of it.

It's a core reason, but there's all sorts of other aspects of it that can be refined or not refined.

And then people kind of muddy it up with taste.

So how do you know if you've achieved a sense of taste if we're going to even use that term?

But it's not, it's not taste.

Like it's not, it's a skill, right?

It's not your opinion of a thing.

It's knowing how the medium works.

Every medium we use, if, again, I go back to the car or the mac and cheese, like the medium of food or the medium of the vehicle, the medium of product design, right?

There are these aspects of it, tools, components, dimensions that make it the thing it is.

Like, that's what you have to work with building blocks.

And do you know how that works?

Product design is very interesting because it has a lot of graphic design in it?

A lot of this, you know, communication design?

And then you got this 4th dimension of interactivity.

This is very intriguing kind of medium.

But you can achieve this sense by knowing that medium, being a person who thinks about outcomes.

Because even if you're Making mac and cheese.

There's an outcome you're after.

Otherwise, you just grab the box of mac and cheese and make it, right?

There's an outcome that you're thinking about.

And to know the outcome is what affects your design decisions all along the way, which brings me to the process.

You have to know the design process.

Because then you can you can purposefully follow or break those constraints.

It's always about purpose.

It will always be about purpose.

So the internet is trying to tell you that you can use AI as long as you have a sense of refinement.

And I say whatever you use to create, you must have a knowledge of design.

Without it, it's guesswork, right?

This is the design process and the medium, all of those things, outcomes.

You'll never be able to communicate design decisions to anyone if you don't know how all of that works.

Because you may end up guessing on things or copying what someone else does if you have good taste.

You just copy that AI generates this thing that's like this other thing.

And okay, we want the thing.

We want that style.

We want that thing.

But you don't know why it works.

You just know that it is.

Right?

If you go down that path.

You'll end up being a human in the loop.

And I think the human in the loop is another excuse to try to say, hey, we still need judgment.

We still need this thing.

But really, it's, it's pushing a button.

It's being, you know, okay, okay, okay, approving things instead of actually designing.

So that's, we don't want to go there.

That's not what we want to do.

We want to think thoughtfully.

So I found this post on LinkedIn.

Let me see if I can bring this over here.

And this is by Thomas Cast.

And then he's an art director.

I don't know him personally, but I really like what he had to say.

I just want to kind of read this and comment on it.

And we talk a little bit about it.

It's a great piece on what we're talking about.

Inflation of taste and creativity in the AI era.

He says, I hear this quite a lot.

AI doesn't kill design, it merely accelerates the iteration process.

What matters now is taste and good judgment, designers with taste are needed more than ever.

He says, sounds reasonable if we assume that taste is a static plus binary thing, as in, you either have it or you don't.

Nothing's further from the truth.

And now I pause there and agree and say, yeah, it does speed up.

I mean, AI definitely speeds it up.

You can go from taking days to create screens to seconds.

But that's not the and it's not even just a, um, process, you know, change.

Like now we're using this new tool.

No, there's actually a loss in the act of handing that over to automation.

And this thing of taste being static, and like you have it or you don't, it's not.

There is so much dynamic nature that's happening in design, even in product design that, um, that's one of the reasons why purpose drives design because even in the project, if you've been involved in any product design project, you know that what you thought you started out with at the beginning of the project with the purpose, within the 1st week of doing it, you've already discovered new things that have altered that purpose.

And therefore the design has needs to be altered.

So it's very dynamic, definitely in a dynamic career here.

So back to the post.

He says, taste and good judgment are one's reaction to the surrounding reality.

To top that off, the development of taste isn't linear.

Just because you've got good taste today doesn't mean you still have it tomorrow.

That's right.

He says, look at this example of a hypothetical music band, your favorite music band.

The 1st albums were fine.

Then we got a few great ones.

Then there was a period of shameless money grabbing mediocrity until it just ended up producing repetitive rubbish that no one can listen to anymore.

Sound familiar?

Right?

So he's talking at a broader level of kind of the story arc of, you know, an entity producing a thing.

And then they started out with their own sense of creativity and purpose.

And then they started following what was happening around them in order to chase the metric, you know, the money grab mediocrity.

And then it's rinse and repeat because you know it works.

So that's not what we're doing.

That's not design.

It's definitely not a vision.

And so he continues.

It gets much worse with design.

Unlike art, design needs a purpose to exist.

Now, a pause right there and comment that art also has a purpose to exist because it's not arbitrary.

It's not random.

Art still communicates a message.

And there's a reason to do it.

And there's a medium involved and you can break or conform to the rules.

But at the in the end, you're producing a thing.

And of course, the skill in which you produce it is could be refined.

But yeah, it's it all needs purpose.

Creativity needs purpose to exist and exist is really to fulfill its purpose, to have an outcome, intended outcome.

He continues in contrast to many artists, designers, never have 100% creative control over their work.

Since there are too many people to please along the way, the art director, the copywriter, the client, the current trans, et cetera.

Then there are portfolios completed to please the recruiters rather than showcase originality.

After all, you ought to demonstrate that you are a quote, good fit, a good fit meaning, do exactly what everybody else does, only cheaper and faster.

And I pause again and say, yet there are too many, he says too many people to please along the way.

I rush towards that and embrace it and say, those are the people that are on board with this product.

When you, you aren't, let's see, we'll back it up and say as the designer.

You aren't 100% in creative control over your work.

That's not the job.

The job is to shape the vision and the purpose and give it direction so that it achieves that outcome.

It's very, uh, we could say business oriented, but there are a lot of people involved.

The art director, the copyright of the client. Each one of these are people.

They're not static either.

They have experience, they have ability, and they are contributing, in a greater or lesser sense, to the overall product, and you have to work with that as a constraint.

It's another design element.

Um, The art director may have an arbitrary reason for saying something.

That's unfortunately, that's not purposeful, but for you, it becomes the purpose.

So the challenge is, how are you going to do the best work you can and still deliver that outcome.

That the challenge.

You can do it.

It is possible.

Absolutely.

But he's absolutely true about, um, you know, portfolios used to please recruiters and things like that that you're a good fit.

And I would say the same thing about being a good fit.

This is the fundamental thing.

What is true?

And display that.

What you do.

We talked about this in another episode of effortless.

You know, what is effortless to you?

Well, do that, do that well.

The best you can do.

That's what you're presenting.

People can take it or leave it.

And that's the hard part when you see all these other things happening around you.

And you just want to follow the trend.

It doesn't end well because that's not, that's not who you are.

That's not what you're doing.

And he kind of says that.

This is great.

He continues.

So designers censor themselves, quote, this is far too wacky for my CD.

Quote, the client will never take a risk with this, quote, this is not what they expect to see at the XYZ agency. Lets give them what they want.

And then he says, then there's AI.

The one size fit all aesthetic, everyone, everybody in the corporate world is willing to die for.

So then he asks some questions.

These are great questions.

How are designers to retain good taste and judgment if good taste and judgment aren't rewarded anymore.

How is it possible not to give in to mediocrity?

We live in a world that favors speed, efficiency, conversion rates.

There's no place for error for wavering and experiment.

AI does it for you now.

Quote, designers with taste are needed, unquote.

That may be, but will anyone listen.

So he has the rhetorical question, but of course, I want to answer them.

That's There's got to be an answer.

So, what do you do?

Yeah, if it's not rewarded anymore.

How do you not give into mediocrity?

You know, I think the balance here is staying true to what you do.

Like what is design?

What does it mean to be refined?

What does it mean to take the medium?

And with all those principles, and apply them in a way when you're requested to, For a job, in the highest skill possible and as effective as possible.

That's the talent.

The rest of what's swirling around with AI, not AI, there's a lot of discussion.

There's, there's a lot of artificial, artificial intelligence.

There's a lot of artificial promotion happening.

There's real things happening as well.

AI does have a number of use cases that are practical.

And yet at the same time, it's very tenuous.

And so depending on your use case, It may not be where you need to put all the baskets.

And I think I end up coming down on, we were made, we were created, where people were made in the image of God.

He was a creator.

He is a creator.

He's the creator.

And so we have this ability to create.

We don't need to offload it to anything else.

We need to continue creating.

And in doing so, We're collaborating.

We're working together, we're learning, we're encouraging, and we're producing a thing.

And hopefully the thing you're producing is a helpful thing.

It helps another person do what they were made to do.

That's the top of the line.

I think all of the other questions, all the other pressures, everything that's happening in the doom scrolling, if you keep going through that, it's not helpful.

So thank you, Thomas Cast, for that piece.

You can check out his link there.

You see thomascast.art.

But yeah, we're all facing this and create as creatives.

So what do you do about this taste?

Well, I don't want to use the term because there's too much baggage in it now.

And besides, I don't think stakeholders know what you mean by it.

If you're going to use taste, I have taste.

Does the time design team have taste?

Yeah, you can't measure it.

It's one of those things.

It sounds great.

But let's talk in terms of purpose, clarity, refinement. Right?

These are tangible criteria you can relate to and they're actionable.

They can be actionable.

You can't just have taste, right?

It's not, yeah, an even purpose and clarity and refinement.

Those things are great, but they don't stand alone.

You need process.

And when you're presented with a design, do you know how to look at it, right?

That's kind of the challenge.

Can you decompose it as to why it works?

I mean, AI is going to present you with a design.

Can you understand it?

Can you decompose it?

Can you assess the merits of it?

Of its effectiveness because of what was done with it?

And for product design, can you explain why every element on the screen is there?

Can you explain the job that those elements are doing?

And what happens to the outcome if those elements are absent?

So many times I've seen designers put a key line, you know, to separate elements or borders on things or a drop shadow.

It's like, why is that there?

It's not arbitrary, it does a thing.

It's a very useful tool, all of those things.

Used in the wrong way, right?

Used in an ineffective way, it's not refined.

But if you can use them in such a way to create this effect, then you can achieve any outcome that you set out to do, and that's valuable.

Be that person.

And I can help too.

I've produced a masterclass that is called designed for value.

And I go through the design process I've developed over the years.

We've talked about it many times on the daily sprint, but it's not just to have you give you a strong basis for product design, but it's the same process that you can use to communicate design decisions with stakeholders.

These are hand in hand types of things.

It's not an isolated, like learn this skill, how to make screens or learn this leadership skill.

No, it's intertwined.

You do it every day.

And you may be doing it by accident?

Well, I want to help you do it on purpose.

So you can check that out at designing Academy.

Specifically it's academy.designy.com

Well, thanks for listening to the Daily Sprint.

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