Taste, Craft, and Quality in Design

Practical and opinionated definitions:

Taste

Taste is the ability to recognize good. It’s seeing quality, forming strong opinions about what works and what doesn’t, and making judgment calls when there’s no clear right answer. Taste comes from pattern recognition built through reps and experience—time spent consuming, critiquing, and analyzing work, understanding its strengths, weaknesses, and context.

Evaluating taste is difficult. In interviews, I’d ask: “What’s a product you’ve used recently that left an impression? What made it good? What were its shortcomings?” Where someone anchors their answer, be it aesthetics, ergonomics, systems thinking, or emotional resonance, is a small glimpse into their taste.

Craft

Craft is the ability to solve a problem completely. It requires mastery of both the problem and the medium. Mastery of the problem means knowing what you’re solving deeply enough to recognize when it’s solved. Mastery of the medium means understanding your tools and constraints well enough to execute without waste.

Quality

Quality governs both taste and craft, perhaps in ways we don’t necessarily expect. Quality is both an attribute of the work and a property of the system that produces the work. The level of quality you ship is defined by what your organization tolerates. A designer with impeccable taste and craft will still ship mediocre work inside a system that rewards speed over care, or that lacks the feedback loops to catch problems before they reach users.

Balance

Taste and craft have been used interchangeably to talk about the design role of the future. Design outputs are cheaper than they’ve ever been, and tools/AI have collapsed the cost of producing something. This makes taste and craft more important, not less. It’s what separates adequate from exceptional.

Generative tools produce plausible output, and without taste, plausible looks like good. If you can’t recognize good, you won’t recognize bad. That’s where human judgment becomes the differentiator: not in production, but in discernment.

Craft negging

Catt Small’s excellent Stop craft negging captures the frustration occuring because craft and taste are ambiguously defined, and then used to critique individual work. People with power (design leaders and others) should recognize and align on how taste and craft is discussed, otherwise an organizational dysfunction emerges and a quality blame game is played instead of delivering great products.

Taste is harder to pin down than craft, but equally important—it’s how we articulate quality when the metrics might not exist. But the deficiency almost always lies in the system of quality, not individual taste or craft. That’s why leaders especially need to treat these as separate constructs: collapsing them invites exactly the dysfunction Catt describes.