Taste Is a Muscle
Why developing better taste has almost nothing to do with aesthetics.
I was recently asked where I think taste comes from. Hard question for someone who’s not normally that deep. But it got me thinking.
Taste is a weird, hard-to-grasp concept. Is it subjective, or is there such a thing as objectively good taste? Is it something we're born with, or something we build over time?
I’m not talking about the kind of taste that’s confined to fashion, interiors or graphic design. I’m talking about the broader kind. The kind that quietly shapes almost every decision we make without us even noticing.
The restaurant you choose over the one next door.
The books that end up on your bedside table.
The people you’re drawn towards.
The brands you build.
The homes you create.
The life you slowly assemble through thousands of seemingly insignificant decisions.
Most tend to think of taste as something aesthetic. I think it’s much bigger than that.
In many ways, taste is simply judgement: the ability to recognise what belongs.
What feels coherent. What feels inevitable. What deserves to exist, and what doesn’t.
It’s one of those things that’s incredibly difficult to define, but instantly recognisable when you encounter it. We’ve all walked into a home that feels considered. Read a sentence that couldn’t have been written any other way. Seen a brand identity that feels so aligned with the business behind it that it’s impossible to imagine an alternative.
It’s as though everything just clicks, naturally.
Not because it’s objectively beautiful, but because it belongs.
I’ve realised that’s the feeling I’ve been chasing for as long as I can remember.
When I was little, I rearranged my bedroom almost every weekend. I’d move furniture from one side of the room to the other, swap posters around, reorganise shelves and endlessly edit my environment until something inside me settled.
I wasn’t trying to impress anyone. (My 10-yr old mates didn’t give a sh*t!)
I just knew when it felt right.
Looking back, I don’t think I was simply decorating my room.
I think I was training my eye.
At the time, I couldn’t have explained what I was doing. I didn’t have words like composition, proportion or visual hierarchy. I simply followed a feeling that something could be better than it currently was. That there was another arrangement, another combination, another version of the room that felt more like itself. And I guess, helped me feel more like myself.
That instinct has never really left me.
These days it shows up differently. It’s brands instead of bedrooms. Writing instead of posters. Moodboards instead of magazine clippings. But the process feels remarkably similar. I’m still moving pieces around, bringing bits in and chucking stuff out until something clicks.
The difference is that now I’m fascinated by why it clicks.
Because I don’t think taste is something we accidentally stumble into.
I think we build it.
Not through expensive furniture or European holidays or knowing which chair Charles and Ray Eames designed.
We build it by paying attention.
I’ve always been a participant in culture. I’m endlessly fascinated by what’s emerging. New brands, hotels, fashion, architecture, products. I collect references almost compulsively, not because I’m looking for things to copy, but because I’m trying to understand why certain things resonate while others don’t.
Why does this campaign stay with me?
Why do I feel closer to this creator over that one?
Why does this lounge feel timeless while another feels dated after six months?
Why does one sentence make me stop reading, while another makes me want to dive deeper?
Those questions have become far more valuable to me than the answers themselves.
Most people consume culture. I think creative people interrogate it.
Every observation becomes another distinction. Another tiny calibration of your internal compass. Over time, you begin recognising patterns that other people simply haven’t spent enough time noticing.
I reckon that’s what taste is.
Accumulated attention.
But attention, on its own, isn’t enough.
Because eventually there comes a moment where you have to choose.
This. Not that. Again. And again.
Which is where I believe taste becomes something much deeper than aesthetics.
It becomes identity.
One of the biggest lessons of my career came during the early years of Smack Bang. At the time, we didn’t offer brand strategy. We were designing identities without first helping our clients understand who they were trying to become.
The result was predictable.
I’d present work that, deep down, I believed was right. The client would ask for changes. We’d discuss colours, logos, layouts and typography as though they were simply matters of personal preference. And because I didn’t yet have a framework to support my thinking, I’d often compromise.
I knew it was a mistake.
I just didn’t have enough reasoning-ammunition to explain why.
Everything changed when we introduced strategy.
Suddenly there was a shared understanding of the customer, the positioning, the role the brand needed to play adn the white space we were gunning for. Design stopped becoming a conversation about personal preference and started becoming an expression of strategic intent.
The work didn’t improve because our taste suddenly became better.
It improved because we finally trusted it enough to defend it.
I’ve thought about that lesson a lot over the years.
I no longer think it was about branding.
I think it was about self-trust.
Which leads me to something I’ve come to believe quite deeply.
Taste requires self-trust.
Self-trust requires self-possession.
And self-possession requires doing the work.
Not design work… Inner work.
Because the clearer I’ve become about who I am, the clearer my taste has become.
Not because I’ve become more cultured. And definitely not because I’ve become more sophisticated.
But because I’ve become less interested in borrowing somebody else’s judgement.
I wonder if that’s what we often mistake for “bad taste”?!
Not a lack of aesthetic ability, but rather a lack of identity.
I really do believe that people who don’t yet know what they think inevitably end up outsourcing their thinking. To trends, algorithms, influencers. To the consensus. They spend so much time looking outward that they lose the ability to recognise what genuinely resonates inwardly.
Taste can’t exist without identity.
One informs the other.
Your taste is simply one of the ways your identity makes itself visible.
Which also explains why I think taste and instinct are inseparable.
People often ask me how I know when something is right.
The truth is, I usually feel it long before I can explain it.
Something just... belongs.
It feels internally consistent. Cohesive. Like every decision is reinforcing the same idea. I can sense the logic before I’ve found the language.
Only later does analysis catch up.
(Sometimes I’ll save a image to Pinterest and have absolutely no idea why. Six months later, I’ll stumble across it again and suddenly understand exactly what I was seeing. I’ve stopped expecting my taste to explain itself immediately.)
Maybe that’s all instinct really is: Pattern recognition that hasn’t yet become conscious.
And maybe taste is what happens when you’ve spent years training that instinct through observation, curiosity and relentless attention.
So, how do you develop better taste?
Read widely.
Travel when you can.
Visit galleries.
Notice details.
Study brands.
Build moodboards.
Collect references.
All of those things matter.
But they’re only inputs.
The real work begins when you start paying equal attention to yourself.
To your reactions.
Your instincts.
Your curiosities.
The things you return to over and over again for reasons you can’t quite explain.
I don’t think taste is about becoming more like the people you admire. I think it’s about becoming more unmistakably yourself.
Perhaps that’s why I’ve stopped thinking of taste as an aesthetic skill altogether.
I think it’s a human one.
And like any muscle, the more deliberately you use it, the stronger it becomes.