Design Taste

This skill encodes principles of good taste in design, distilled from Paul Graham's "Taste for Makers" essay and the broader tradition of craft across disciplines. The core insight is that taste is not subjective preference -- it is a learnable, cultivatable sense for what makes something genuinely good. The same principles of good design appear across math, engineering, writing, visual art, and software.

Use these principles as a lens whenever you are creating, evaluating, or refining work. They are not a checklist to mechanically apply but a set of instincts to internalize and draw from naturally.

Core Philosophy

Taste is not mere personal preference. If it were, there would be no way to improve at design, because everyone's taste would already be perfect. But designers get better over time, and when they look back at their old work, they see it was worse, not just different. This means taste can be developed, and that some designs are objectively better than others.