Engineered Taste

People assume taste is innate. It isn’t. Designers with strong visual intuition built it deliberately — through thousands of hours of looking, comparing, and naming what they see. The “natural eye” is trained.

The deliberate practice model breaks down:

Collect examples. Screenshots, photos, physical objects. When something works, save it.
Articulate the pattern. “The type is set at 14px with 1.8 line-height — the extra leading makes long paragraphs breathable.” Naming forces you to see precisely. Vague impressions (“it looks clean”) can’t be reused. Specific observations (“generous whitespace, muted grays, one accent color”) can.
Pattern-match across domains. The same 1.8 line-height works on unrelated sites. The same 4px spacing appears in iOS, in Stripe’s dashboard, in a Japanese stationery catalog.
Integrate into instinct. The conscious process compresses. What required analysis becomes automatic.

Researchers call this transition from novice to expert “chunking” — the brain learns to perceive compound patterns as single units.

Design writing often downplays aesthetic judgment, treating design as process rather than perception. But every design choice operates within style — the usability of an interface depends on whether it matches what users expect things to look like.

Famous designers’ choices appear based on intuition. But that intuition is trained — years of drawing, building, modeling, looking.

Once trained, the eye notices everywhere: kerning on cereal boxes, the 12mm radius on Muji shelf corners, why one jacket follows body contours while another cuts straight across.

The difference between good taste and no taste isn’t sensitivity. It’s mileage.

Go Deeper

Books

Interaction of Color by Josef Albers — Training the eye through systematic color exercises. The method itself demonstrates deliberate taste development.
Dieter Rams: As Little Design as Possible by Sophie Lovell — How Rams developed his design sensibility through decades of practice.
The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman — Design perception and cognition, though more about usability than aesthetics.

Essays

“Taste for Makers” by Paul Graham — On developing taste in software and design.
Ellen Lupton’s writings on typography and visual culture — Practical articulation of design patterns.

Practice

Collect systematically. Steal like an artist. Name what you see. The eye trains through accumulated mileage.