Why is this on my mind?

We’ve been talking so much about Craft within the Design org over the last year at Dropbox. Alastair, our VP of Design, has put out his calls to start a movement along with the action-oriented messages to focus on fundamentals, be bold, and tinker more. One of the specific elements of craft where I get a lot of questions is around visual design so I thought I’d share my perspective on taste and it’s connection to the craft of visual design.

I’m just not that good at visual design…

One of the wonderful things about our Dropbox Design team is that we’re a very diverse group. We come from technical backgrounds, architecture, music, graphic design, along with more traditional UX or UI design paths. But the nature of such a mixed group is that our strengths and weaknesses are not remotely uniform in each designer. Alastair has laid the groundwork with the focus on fundamentals call-to-action for our organization to spend more time on underlying basics of our craft, especially in visual design. Many members of the team have never spent significant time learning about gestalt principles, the intricacies of typography, color theory, and so on. These elements of visual craft translate to many best practices in Software design along with providing the ability to see how every individual decision in a design effects it’s potential emotional output for our customers and their perspective on our product feeling special and well-crafted.

What is taste?

That brings me to Taste, a terribly fuzzy word that can be interpreted across so many contexts. It’s very hard to define, but let’s say that taste is:

The lived and earned experiences and understanding that allow you to edit and determine what is ‘good.’

So think of your taste as the palette and tool box that allow you to then ‘craft’ your own outputs. Taste is what you have to work with, craft is what you’re able to do with it.

How to improve your taste?

One important belief is that you’re not born with good taste. It’s not inherent to the individual. However, it is highly informed the environment in which you live. Luckily for us, our environment and our behaviors are entirely within our control!

While it’s much more difficult to sustainably change your inner motivations and thus what you may become curiously obsessed with, you can make an informed effort to learn and experience more of the variables necessary to inform your taste.

Louis Pasteur said “in the field of observation, chance favors only the prepared mind.” This so eloquently makes the point that your creativity and what you’re able to craft will only ever be as good as the preparation you put in before you’re working.

To enable your taste to improve you need three fundamental elements:

Curiosity
Exposure
Vulnerability

Curiosity

Curiosity is a far simpler concept than serendipity and far more useful. People who are curious are more likely to expend effort to answer a question on their mind. To be successful in creative pursuits requires an active curiosity and a desire to do experiments and make mistakes, having the sensibility that a mistake is a kind of insight, however small, waiting to be revealed.
— Scott Berkun

It’s easy to get lost in the mindset that you’re incapable of seeing what other people able to see and craft. With the knowledge that you are able to improve your taste, you can find your inner motivations and curiosities. Simply sitting with someone you respect for great taste and asking them what they observe in say a product or film can be enlightening and light a flame for your own curiosity.

Exposure

You have to learn to SEE. Opening yourself to a wide funnel of content, context, and environments will provide you with the opportunity to being to form the neural connections and deeply earned experience or knowledge that allow you to pull from in the future.

Learning to see, to ask new questions of what you see, to observe at a level beneath the surface is a skill in it’s own right and I recommend starting with some of these books:

1️⃣ Content

What are you looking at on a day to day basis? Are you doing it intentionally? Opening yourself up to a wide variety of content including music, books, art, films, products, software, media, etc in a way that ensures the ability to see different approaches, methods, media, etc. provides the base from which you begin to make connections.

Eventually everything connects - people, ideas, objects. The quality of the connections is the key to quality per se.
— Charles Eames

2️⃣ Context

Within the content you’re viewing and at the point it was created, what was the context? Observing or being curious about the location it was created, who created it, when it was created, and why provide you with a deeper level understanding of how it may have been achieved. The context may unlock the underlying influences or allow you to see the bigger connection between ideas and the methods used.

3️⃣ Environment

How are you finding the spaces and environment to see and think? Are you giving yourself the variety necessary to allow your tastes to develop within the environmental context and people within those environments?

Working from your home office isn’t the most conducive to creativity unless you’ve truly invested within an environment you know best enables the behavior you want. Perhaps you want focus because you’re easily distracted, perhaps the distractions are the things that allow you to be more creative.

Vulnerability

Finally, you’ll need vulnerability. You’ll need to develop a growth mindset that allows you to screw up happily, and often because you know every new mistake is a way to learn. Working on developing your taste is not a race, it’s a commitment to your life long ability to see, connect, and craft the world around you.

I love the fact that taste isn’t a measurable outcome, it’s not about impact, it’s not an achievable milestone. Taste is a wily, an infinite loop in which you can never attain perfection. The sooner you come to that realization the sooner you can find the join in seeing and learning what you find beautiful or tasteful.

See more. Good luck.

Good taste is earned through obsessive curiosity