You can't cook food better than you can taste it.
I heard this first from Abhinav Chikkara in a 10k Designers session, and it stopped me. Because the same is true of design. If your eye can't distinguish between a good design and a mediocre one, you can't make better ones.
Taste isn't a talent you're born with. It's a sensitivity you develop — slowly, through looking at a lot of work and asking what you're noticing.
Here's how I built mine.
Look at a lot of design — all of it.
Not just the inspirational stuff. Dribbble shots, yes, but also bad enterprise dashboards, airport kiosks, government websites, food delivery apps that frustrate you. The bad stuff is as instructive as the good.
When you see something that frustrates you to use, the question isn't "this is bad" — it's "why does this fail?" When you see something that feels effortless, ask what decision made it that way.
I keep Mobbin open when I'm exploring patterns. Not to copy, but to understand what conventions have formed and why users have come to expect them.
Compare things side by side.
Taste gets sharper through comparison, not through looking at things in isolation. Put a version that frustrates you next to one that doesn't. Put your first draft next to the inspiration that motivated it. The gap between them is the thing you're trying to learn.
The difference between a designer with taste and one without isn't usually that one has better ideas — it's that one has a sharper sense of when something isn't there yet.
Develop a "why" practice.
When you notice something — a micro-interaction that felt satisfying, a layout that made you read without effort, a button placement that confused you — ask why. This is a habit you have to build deliberately. Your first reactions are just reactions. The useful part is what comes after.
I started keeping a note when I saw something worth understanding. Not screenshots — just the observation and the reason behind it. This practice changed how I look at everything.
Copy to learn.
Copying is underrated as a learning method. Pick a design you admire and recreate it from scratch — not trace it, but rebuild it. You'll make hundreds of micro-decisions that the original designer already solved, and you'll start to feel why they made the choices they did.
This isn't plagiarism for your portfolio. It's a practice for your eye. Musicians do it. Painters do it. Designers should do it more.
What actually feeds taste faster.
Not passive scrolling. The inputs that moved my eye faster were case studies — especially growth.design, which breaks down why decisions were made, not just what they look like. Books that explain principles (Refactoring UI changed how I think about visual hierarchy). And paying attention to products I use every day with the question: why did they make this choice?
The difference between browsing Dribbble and reading a Growth Design case study is the difference between looking at a chef's dish and watching them cook.
Taste is about calibration, not certainty.
You don't need to love everything or hate everything confidently. What you need is a sense of what's missing — the ability to stand in front of your own work and feel the gap between what it is and what it could be. That restlessness is taste working.
The designers I admire most aren't the ones with the strongest opinions about other people's work. They're the ones with the highest dissatisfaction with their own — and the discipline to keep iterating because of it.
Taste is what separates two designers who both know Figma. The one with taste knows when the screen isn't done yet, even if they can't immediately name what's wrong.
That instinct isn't magic. It's repetition, attention, and the habit of asking why.
Credits & further reading
- Abhinav Chikkara, 10k Designers — the chef metaphor that opens this note is from one of his sessions. His explanation of taste as something you cultivate rather than possess stuck with me.
- Taste is Eating Silicon Valley — Anu Atluru (workingtheorys.com). The argument that taste is becoming the scarce resource in a world of abundant AI-generated output. Worth reading in full.
- Refactoring UI — Adam Wathan & Steve Schoger. The clearest writing I've read on visual hierarchy, spacing, and color. Changed how I think about why things look right or wrong.
- Don't Make Me Think — Steve Krug. A short, sharp book on usability. Reading it once trains your eye to notice when things create unnecessary friction.
- The Design of Everyday Things — Don Norman. The foundational text on affordances and how design communicates what's possible. Builds the vocabulary to explain why something confuses people.
- growth.design — case studies that reverse-engineer product decisions using a comic book format. Better than any Dribbble scroll for actually understanding why design choices were made.
- Mobbin — a searchable library of real app screens. Useful for understanding patterns that exist in the wild, not just in design portfolios.