The Growth of Skill and Taste
One day, I was mindlessly flicking through my emails. As I exiled several unwanted correspondence into mail trash, I came across a newsletter email from Felix Lee. The subject said Why taste vs skill will change your career (forever). How on earth did Felix know that I had been eagerly anticipating eternal career transformation? Click. The subject was catchy enough to get my attention, so I was curious about the concept of skill vs taste.
As I read, I found that Felix’s theory on growing your design abilities (skill) to match your design intuition (taste) helped articulate my experience so far as a designer. In essence, I know what good design looks like because I consume it. But I find it difficult to execute the visions in my head sometimes, because I’m still learning what makes great design, great. This is a trait found in very experienced people; they intuitively design in a way that works because their time spent practicing has acquainted their minds and their hands with the technicalities of great design.
Ira Glass has a beautifully fitting piece he wrote on this subject:
All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. …Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have…. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week [to create something]. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.
Side note: I agree with Ira’s quote, but I also believe that sometimes your innate taste is not enough to propel you to building excellent skills to match. The reason why you might be able to know that your work simply isn’t hitting the mark is the fact that you’ve seen examples of good design that have refined your design palette. Not because of your natural inclination towards good design (or any other creative endeavour).
When it comes to evaluating my skill versus taste, my goal is — work that’s as good as my ambitions, skills that are as good as my taste. And like Ira said, only those who are given to practice can ever attain the point where your skills match your taste and are demonstrated in your output
