Engineered Taste
Designers with strong visual intuition developed it deliberately. The research on expertise acquisition shows four themes: experiential knowledge, adaptability, perceptiveness, and motivational support. Taste follows the same pattern — it accumulates through repeated exposure and explicit analysis.
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 the mechanism makes it portable.
- 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 thinking discourse often represses the role of aesthetic judgment, treating design as process rather than perception. But designers operate within discernments of style; the usability of designed artifacts depends on coherence with the taste regimes of users.
Famous designers’ choices appear based on intuition. But that intuition is trained — years of drawing, building, modeling, looking.
The trained eye notices everywhere: kerning on cereal boxes, the 12mm radius on Muji shelf corners, why one jacket fits the contour lines of the body while another cuts straight across.
Taste looks like instinct. It’s accumulated seeing.