On taste as discipline. And why it matters now.
Most people hear the word taste and think preference. Good taste. Bad taste. There’s no accounting for taste. The vernacular is consistent and it all points the same direction: taste is personal, subjective, impossible to argue with. You have yours. I have mine. End of discussion.
During the early part of my career, I thought the same thing. Then I found Massimo Vignelli’s writing on the subject.
Vignelli’s position was unambiguous and, to many people, deeply provocative: in the context of design, taste is not preference. It is a discipline. The capacity to know when something true has been expressed with the precision and elegance it deserves. To know when a solution is fully resolved—and when it isn’t. Not a feeling. A standard.
My first response was confusion, then resistance. He was asking me to undo years of accumulated thinking about taste as a subjective condition. Over time, I came to see that his choice of the word was entirely deliberate. He wasn’t being imprecise. He was making a demand—of designers, certainly, and of audiences, as well. He was teaching that there is a discipline behind the designed things we experience every day, and that, just as it is the designer’s responsibility to bring that discipline to the work, it is the audience’s responsibility to respect and understand it.
That’s a more serious claim about design—and about the relationship between designer and audience—than most people are comfortable with. It was more serious than I was comfortable with, for a while.
Taste as Vignelli practiced it is about distillation. The slow, measured removal of everything that doesn’t belong. Not adding until something feels complete—subtracting until nothing false remains. The Japanese have a word for this: ma. The discipline of negative space. The purposeful absence that gives everything around it meaning. It is not emptiness. It is precision.
Steve Jobs understood it as the hardest creative act—not deciding what to include, but deciding what to leave out. Product decisions made under his leadership were subtraction decisions first. Vignelli practiced this across six decades of legendary work. It hasn’t aged because it was never decorative, only essential. Every element present because it earned its place.
I was fortunate to be in the room for an intimate presentation of his life’s work late in his career. The work was extraordinary. But that wasn’t what stayed with me. It was the severity of his standard. Every decision fully considered. Nothing arbitrary. The discipline, applied without compromise, across a lifetime of work.
That is taste. Not what you like. What you know to be resolved.
Why it matters now more than ever.
There is a reason this notion of taste feels urgent at this particular moment. We are living through the largest expansion of creative output in human history, powered by artificial intelligence. The tools exist to produce—quickly, cheaply, at scale—work that is competent, coherent, and entirely without discipline. Work that has no standard behind it beyond the prompt that generated it.
This is not an argument against the tools. It is an argument for what the tools cannot replace: the human capacity to know when something is finished. Not when it is complete in the mechanical sense—when every element is present—but when it is resolved. When it is true.
That capacity is taste. And it develops only one way—through years of serious practice, sustained exposure to the best available work, the discipline of honest internal dialogue, and the willingness to hold every outcome to the highest standard.
Vignelli spent sixty years building that standard. He didn’t think of it as preference. He thought of it as responsibility. It was one of his great gifts to those of us who aspire to follow his path.