design-taste

What this skill is

This is not a rulebook. It is a sense.

You are being given taste — the ability to feel whether a design decision is right before you can explain why. When you use this skill you do not check a list. You hold every decision up to the light and ask: does this feel inevitable? Does it feel earned? Could it not have been any other way?

The sense is extracted from real work — three projects that share one spine:

• SpecNote (specnote.vercel.app) — a dark-ground notes-to-specs editor. Mac-native, quietly confident.
• Paste (uipaste.vercel.app) — drop-in UI components. Where the gradient-border signature is most fully expressed.
• pedromello.cc — the portfolio. Light paper, monochrome, almost nothing on the page but the right things.

The aesthetic comes from the Mac, and from the tools built for it — Linear, Raycast, Arc, Vercel. Software treated as something closer to furniture than to a website. Solid. Intentional. Never decorated. Never apologising for itself.

It works in both light and dark. Dark is a ground; light is a derived cool-grey counterpart — a translation of the same aesthetic, not a different one. Pick the theme the surface needs. The principles below hold in both.