When I was a kid, my mum let me choose two colours to paint the walls of my bedroom.
The good news is that I distinctly remember insisting on beautiful, textured Porter’s Paints. The bad news is that I chose purple and yellow.
So, we’ll call that an early work in progress.
I grew up in a regional town, where the cultural ceiling - at least when it came to design, fashion and art - was relatively low. I wasn’t wandering through galleries every weekend or growing up surrounded by extraordinary architecture. But somehow I had a sense for when things just ‘clicked’ from an early age.
For a long time, I assumed taste was something you either had or you didn’t.
I don’t believe that anymore.
I think some people probably begin with greater sensitivity to it. In the same way some people naturally have an ear for music or an aptitude for numbers, some people seem more attuned to proportion, tension, colour, language, composition. But nearly two decades of working in branding has convinced me that an eye can be trained.
In fact, mine has changed enormously.
Working in a creative industry exposed me to worlds I didn’t know existed. Then I became obsessed with culture more broadly. Fashion led to interiors, interiors to architecture, architecture to art, art to photography, photography to film, restaurants, hotels, books, magazines, people, places. The more I saw, the more references I had. The more references I had, the more precisely I could understand what resonated with me.
But exposure alone doesn’t create taste.
You can spend eight hours a day on Pinterest and become incredibly familiar with what Pinterest thinks is tasteful.
That’s not the same thing.
I think developing taste requires moving from liking things to learning how to look at them.
Here is how I would train an eye.
1. Stop asking, “Do I like it?”
Instead, ask why.
This is probably the single most important thing I have learnt about taste.
When I see something I resonate with, I rarely leave it at I love that. I want to know what is making me love it.
Is it the scale? The proportion? The strange colour combination? The typography? Is there something unexpectedly funny about it? Is it the juxtaposition? Does one element stop everything else from becoming too serious? Would it still work if that one thing disappeared?
The same goes for things I don’t like.
Why don’t I like this?
When I ran my branding agency, I could instinctively recognise designers who had a great eye. It wasn’t necessarily that they were more technically accomplished. There was a certain bravery to them. They were willing to try combinations other people wouldn’t. There was clarity in what they were communicating and a strange kind of congruence in how they put things together. Things just seemed to click.
Explaining why they clicked was harder.
And perhaps that’s exactly why interrogating taste matters. Instinct might give you the initial response, but examining that response teaches you something you can use again.
Try it.
For a week, every time you save something, explain why. One sentence. And you’re not allowed to use beautiful, cool, chic, nice or interesting.
You’ll quickly realise how rarely we actually interrogate our own preferences.
2. Collect obsessively
My camera roll is ridiculous.
Screenshots. Packaging. Outfits. Chairs. Art. Colour combinations. Buildings. Typefaces. Things I’ve seen walking down the street. Things that have absolutely nothing to do with whatever I’m currently working on but have made some part of my brain light up.
I use Miro constantly too. If I’m working on a brand, project or even some weird side quest I’m interested in, I’ll build enormous boards of references.
And then I move them around.
This part feels important.
Taste, for me, is quite physical.
I need to see what happens when one reference sits beside another. Sometimes two individually brilliant things kill each other. Sometimes an image I wasn’t particularly interested in suddenly becomes essential because of what it does to everything around it.
I still love printing references out and scattering it across the floor. Moving it around. Removing things. Putting something back. Standing up and looking at the whole thing from further away.
Eventually, you start to see a world emerge.
I guess it’s called curation.
But curation isn’t simply collecting good things. It’s understanding the relationships between them.
3. Don’t demand that your taste explain itself immediately
There are things I’ve saved that I haven’t understood until months later.
Something catches my eye. I don’t know why. I save it anyway.
Then six months later, I’ll look across everything I’ve collected and realise I’ve saved the same idea fifteen times in fifteen completely different forms.
My eye knew something before I did.
I think we’re sometimes too quick to rationalise our instincts. If we can’t explain why we like something, we assume the response isn’t useful.
I’d argue the opposite.
Create a folder filled with references that could be titled ‘I don’t know why I like this’.
Put things in it without judgement.
Come back in six months.
Your taste will have been leaving you clues.
4. Go upstream
If you love someone’s taste, don’t just look at more of their work.
Find out what they look at.
Who are their references? Which artists do they talk about? What architects influenced them? What films do they return to? Which periods are they borrowing from? Who influenced those people?
When I find someone I find inspiring on Instagram, I often deep dive into who they follow. I let the rabbit hole swallow me up and often come out with not just 1 new source of inspiration, but many.
You’ve just simply got to let the rabbit hole consume you sometimes. Otherwise you end up only sourcing references after they’ve already been interpreted for you.
Don’t just study people with great taste. Study what gave them great taste.
Use the person you admire as the entrance to the rabbit hole, not the end of it.
5. Get further away from your category
One of the fastest ways to make boring work is to only look at other examples of the thing you’re trying to make.
If I’m working on a fragrance brand, I don’t want a reference board full of fragrance brands - that’s a fast train to homogeny. I might have Simon Miller sitting next to an Aritzia campaign, next to a hotel interior, a photograph I took on holiday, a piece of old packaging, an artwork, a weird outfit, a screenshot of someone’s interior and something from The Rochambeau Club that made me laugh.
I’m not necessarily interested in any of those things because I want to copy them. I’m trying to work out what each one contributes to the world I’m building.
Maybe Simon Miller brings irreverence. Aritzia brings scale and polish. Rochambeau brings wit and specificity. An old hotel lobby brings a colour combination. A photograph brings texture. Individually, they’re references. What happens between them is where it gets interesting.
This is why I love working on huge Miro boards or scattering printed references across the floor. I’m not only looking for good things. I’m looking for unlikely things that become better when they’re placed beside each other.
The further a reference sits from its eventual application, the more interpretation it requires from you. You can’t literally turn a Japanese garden into a brand identity. You have to ask what you’re responding to - is it the restraint? Rhythm? Negative space? Asymmetry? - and then translate the principle.
And perhaps that’s where originality starts to creep in.
The further an idea has to travel, the more likely it is to become yours along the way.
6. Study the things that almost work
Everyone has a Pinterest board full of things they love.
I’d suggest making another one.
Call it ALMOST.
Put things in there that, on paper you should like, but somehow don’t.
Beautiful house. Expensive furniture. Incredible photography. Great clothes. Correct references.
And yet...
Nothing. No heart signals.
I have this reaction when something feels too two-dimensional. It might be aesthetically perfect, but if there’s nothing beyond the aesthetic - no wit, cleverness, obscurity, humour, tension, challenge - it loses me.
I want to be drawn into something.
I want there to be another layer when I get closer.
The things that almost work can teach you more than the things you immediately love because they force you to identify the missing 10%.
Sometimes everything is too harmonious.
Sometimes it’s derivative. Or too polished. Sometimes it’s trying desperately to demonstrate good taste. And sometimes it simply has nothing to say.
Figuring out which is which is how discernment gets sharper.
7. Learn to create tension
This might be my favourite part of taste.
The best combinations often contain something that shouldn’t quite be there.
Old with new. Severe with playful. Ugly with beautiful. High-brow with low-brow. Masculine with feminine. Precious with ordinary. Huge with tiny.
If everything belongs together too perfectly, the result can become flat, or too predictable.
I think great creative people understand how much tension something can withstand before it loses coherence.
That’s different from adding weird shit for the sake of being weird. The unexpected element still has to communicate with everything around it.
This is what I meant when I said the best designers I worked with had a sense of congruence. They could make unexpected choices, but somehow those choices clicked.
Perhaps that’s one of the more advanced expressions of taste: Coherence without sameness.
8. Get off the internet
There is a strange paradox happening right now.
We’ve never had access to more extraordinary creative work, and we’ve never been at greater risk of all developing the same taste.
Pinterest shows you more of what you saved yesterday. Instagram learns the designers you linger on. Every aesthetic now has a name, a moodboard, seventeen TikToks explaining it and an algorithm ready to deliver an infinite supply.
So if you want to develop an interesting eye, I think you have to deliberately introduce inputs your algorithm wouldn’t choose for you.
Go somewhere. Look around.
The supermarket. A hardware store. A gallery. A hotel lobby. An old person’s house. A suburban shopping centre. Another country, if you’re lucky enough to travel.
Pick up the weird book. Watch something outside your normal genre. Pay attention to what people are wearing. Photograph a handwritten sign because the lettering is strangely perfect.
I’ve spent my career becoming increasingly obsessed with culture, and I don’t think that means exclusively consuming more high culture.
It means being interested.
Your eye needs nutritional diversity.
9. Then, start removing things
This is the part of taste I find most interesting now.
Because eventually, you have enough references.
The problem stops being What do I like?
It becomes:
What belongs?
When I’m working physically with references - particularly when I’ve printed them and they’re scattered across the floor - the most important stage is the cull.
Take one away.
Better?
Another.
Better?
Eventually you find the smallest collection of references capable of communicating the richest possible world.
And I think that’s the difference between taste and curation.
You can have excellent taste and recognise a hundred brilliant things.
Curation asks you to choose five.
It asks you to understand context. Something can be objectively brilliant and completely wrong here.
The same applies well beyond design.
Your wardrobe. Your house. Your business. Your product range. The people you invite to dinner. The ideas you pursue. The things you allow to take up your attention.
A big part of becoming more discerning is being able to say:
I love that.
And yet, it isn’t for me.
The masterclass is in the why
If I had a 25-year-old creative sitting in front of me and one year to dramatically improve their taste, I don’t think I’d give them a list of galleries to visit or books to read.
I’d show them things.
And I’d ask:
Do you like it?
Then:
Why?
I’d show them something else.
Why don’t you like this?
Again.
Again.
And again, maybe another 80 times.
Because the why is the training.
You can borrow other people’s references. You can learn the rules of composition. You can immerse yourself in extraordinary culture. You can fill your camera roll with beautiful things.
But eventually you have to form a relationship with your own judgement.
