Maker Taste

I don't think anyone “has” taste.

Taste is something other people recognize in your work over time. You can have opinions. You can have preferences. But those alone don’t give you taste. You have to earn it.

Taste starts with exposure. You use products, watch movies, listen to music, visit places. Over time you develop a sense for what you like, what holds up, what feels good. That’s viewer taste.

Making is different

Once you have built something, your taste changes. You start to see things differently. You notice the shortcuts, the tradeoffs, the parts that look simple from the outside but were hard to get right.

In software, those details are often invisible, but you feel them in use. Jonas obsessing over borders in Framer’s CMS. Adam making layer renaming feel instant. Kaloyan on how app history should behave.

Details people will feel, but may never explain. That’s maker taste.

Picking is not making

AI makes it easier to produce options. Generate a few versions, choose the best one, move on. That can make design feel like picking instead of making. That’s viewer taste.

Maker taste is different. It comes from understanding the problem well enough to know what should exist. What to keep. What to remove. What is almost right, but not quite.

Using gives you opinions. Making gives you taste.