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As someone who works with a lot of creatives, I've noticed people tend to get really defensive and self-righteous anytime "taste" comes up, on both sides - the

As someone who works with a lot of creatives, I've noticed people tend to get really defensive and self-righteous anytime "taste" comes up, on both sides - the haute designer-types vs. the scrappy I-can-do-it types. So I won't be surprised if this post is controversial. But it's insightful. Having poor taste (or more charitably, having no taste) can be covered up or ignored by the ability to choose from a pre-curated tasteful menu of options. This is what happens when people who "hate shopping" pick a mainstream clothing brand and stick with it. Or pick a car (most of them). Or a frying pan. I've never seen an offensively ugly frying pan. You could pick one out blindfolded and end up OK 100% of the time. But when you put a tool like generative AI into this person's hands, they are exposed. The palette of possibilities is open. The curation is on you. And if someone with taste isn't in the mix, it will ultimately become apparent when you share your creation with the world.

ivape 1y ago
The problem is there is a mindfuck dynamic the arena of taste brings. Popular taste can overwhelm all other taste. A society may not even know they’ve lost taste for a significant amount of time.
- literalAardvark 1y ago
  [flagged]
  - titzer 1y ago
    The most accessible design is not picking colors at all, but letting users or user agents pick the color scheme and only providing the content.
    - hypertele-Xii 1y ago
      Deferring such decisions to the end user is an ABSENCE of design.
      - titzer 1y ago
        Partly! And that's a good thing, IMO. E.g. providing just the content (think markdown, e.g.) and letting the end user agent render it in a standard way that the user wants is what I had in mind. Like good ole HTML from 1995 :)
    - evilduck 1y ago
      That's conflating content and design. Also, where else are these expectations in society? I think accessible websites are important for equitable access to content, services and tools for those with disabilities, but nobody provides "content only" designs for concert posters where the user is expected to create their own art around it. Nobody who is making a movie supplies the script as the only creative output for the market. Nobody dumps a plaintext unformatted version of a book or research paper expecting you to format it yourself. Nobody creates a comic book which consists only the speech bubbles. Nobody should be expected to produce web sites that are just content.
      - titzer 1y ago
        It's interesting that you provide movie posters as an example. That's literally advertising. At some point the web evolved from being a simple text-based document format to becoming animated, linkable magazines and an endless barrage of advertising. It evolved to look pretty to entertain and entice people, not to inform them. > Nobody dumps a plaintext unformatted version of a book or research paper expecting you to format it yourself. Have you read a novel? It's just text in paragraphs. > Nobody should be expected to produce web sites that are just content. I think you're taking an extreme viewpoint. Have a look at all the markdown on GitHub. Clearly markdown is great for a lot of content. It isn't great for a lot of marketing.
        evilduck 1y ago
        You're taking the extreme view that I mentioned an ad and that invalidated the rest of the examples. Try not cherry picking? >Have you read a novel? It's just text in paragraphs. I take offense to this attack. Have _you_ ever opened a novel? Typesetting matters a whole lot. Go convert an novel's .epub to .txt and ditch all of the fancy design, read it start to finish and tell me it's the same quality of experience. It isn't and you know it isn't. Hell, even different size prints of the same book are differently enjoyable. Your rants about ads do not invalidate the merits of design.
    - tsunamifury 1y ago
      This is ad absurdum. “The best design is doing nothing at all!” Ok
  - watwut 1y ago
    Colorblind have more issues distinguishing shades including shades of grade. These are made by people who see colors too well.
    - b112 1y ago
      Or people who turn the brightness up on their monitor to "make the sun look dim in comparison". My TV has its backlight set to '0' (OLED, and a non-real property to set as no 'backlight', but still a metric). If I set it to 100 my eyes bleed. My current monitor with a real backlight has it set to 5. Yes, 5 out of 100. I think grey on grey works, if the very walls behind you are being bleached by the intensity of the light coming off the monitor.
      - whstl 1y ago
        And those monitors aren't any monitors, they're glossy expensive Apple monitors.
  - MisterTea 1y ago
    As someone who is colorblind and has some vision issues I take offense to that as I struggle with those design choices. It's clear someone with the ability to distinguish color and clarity designs those sites with no consideration for others.
  - Aerroon 1y ago
    The grey UI aspect gets even worse when you use it on certain monitors. It's not that the greys even blend together, no, they are the same color. Looking at you, light mode discord.
  - squigz 1y ago
    In what world are colourblind designers making grey-on-grey UIs? This is a wild statement, and this phrasing... > You don't have to drag everyone to your level in the name of accessibility. is gross.
b112 1y ago
Like it or not, tastes change. Both the personal and society's tastes. If you look back through the past, you can see some horrid design choices. Thus, some designs we think as awesome right now, will be seen as horrid to our descendants. So if that's true, what if taste is social? And if it's social, then... well, all people have is peer pressure taste. And your words show the truth in this, to a degree. Pre-curated options, to ensure "good taste" in choice. And how style conveys social status in some capacity, I don't mean "this style means success" but "this style means you have good taste". Hair styles can be described as "taste", just as a taste in clothing. Yet hair styles suddenly become "ugly" where a decade before they were "tasteful". Even beauty changes. One century it's skin and bones, the next more corpulent. Sometimes it's muscular, other times slim. It's all peer pressure, all social status.
- paulryanrogers 1y ago
  There seems to be an element of familiarity too. What was considered 'cool' when one is a teenager becomes an anchor of sorts. Even if society moves on, there will be a cohort who holds on to the era which made the deepest impression on them.
- dgfitz 1y ago
  I had taste before it was cool! > It's all peer pressure, all social status. You nailed it here. having 'taste' is a completely subjective concept driven mostly by the 'market-makers' of whatever industry. Your 'taste' is determined by the judgment of others.
- nothrabannosir 1y ago
  Some tastes change but not _all_ tastes change. This is a common misconception in conversations about taste: “some of it is subjective therefore it must all be 100% subjective and meaningless”. Yet when this comes round to something you’re good at (music, painting, literature, cooking, sport, …) you immediately recognize that there are in fact timeless elements. Universal truths, which are characterized as subjective only by those who cannot see it. Elements of taste are subjective. Not all of it. You recognize this yourself in your own area of skill. Everyone has one area where suddenly they agree not every opinion has equal merit, and can articulate why. But move out of that subject and into one of their blind spots, and we’re right back to “that’s just taste, taste is subjective, taste changes over time.” Subjectivity is the refuge of the tasteless, who can afford to let others do our thinking for us. GP was right on point in that regard.
pxc 1y ago
Most software I find to provide a smooth, gratifying UX has been carefully designed, but not by a designer. The Fish and Elvish shells have designs involving lots of small, tasteful choices that add up. `fd` refines the traditional Unix `find` CLI in a ton of ways that reflect "good taste" and at the same time brings it more in line with the conventional long and short options of most GNU CLI utilities, including reducing dependence on ordering/positions of arguments. On the other hand, apart from a few odd GUI disasters, it seems every piece of software I've used that has a UI I hate has had one or more designers behind it. Is there even a "haute couture" school of design for interfaces other than GUIs? Are there designers who design for the experiences of people who are visually impaired short of totally blind? It seems to me that virtually no trained designers care about what actually makes computing experiences useful or pleasant for me, let alone beautiful. (And they often devote an inordinate amount of energy to things I'd say don't matter at all.)
- tsunamifury 1y ago
  Yea coherent systems are satisfying. Command line or Ui really has nothing to do with it. That’s about usability. Which is entirely different.
  - pxc 1y ago
    I'm potentially interested in formally studying HCI, but I'm a little worried that my classes will all be filled with visual design people I can't relate to, and that my classes will contain general recommendations that don't apply to users like me, or even make software more difficult to use for me.
    - tsunamifury 1y ago
      First, I would suggest your mentality is a bit... funny as you're saying you want to learn but NOT LIKE THAT. But as someone who did HCI at Berkeley/Stanford and teach it currently, it is a LOT more technical and heuristic driven than just 'designerlyness" So you know, do it, but like also... try to branch out and learn too.
interroboink 1y ago
I haven't read the article, so just speaking generally... (and not meaning to contradict you, just thinking aloud) I think there's some overlap between "taste" and "thinking for yourself" — though they are not the same thing. Lots of people don't want to think for themselves in every teeny aspect of life, so choosing from a menu of "good enough" options is reasonable. It doesn't mean they lack taste, just that they lack the energy/interest/etc in that moment for that activity. Another aspect: plenty of people will know whether they like something when they see it, but they won't be able to describe what they want beforehand. So, they have taste (ability to choose a good one), but not an ability to enunciate it, or conjure it out of thin air. Also, the "taste" terminology is often intertwined with "style", and I think that's unnecessarily limiting. An "engineer's taste" might help them decide between gadgets and gizmos, based on their merits, even if they're both ugly. To your last example, I think modern Lodge cast iron frying pans are mediocre. Not because of ugliness/prettiness, but because the sharp ridge/seam on the handle from the casting process is not ground down. It makes it uncomfortable to hold. Also, the cooking surface is left rough. Compare it to an old Griswold — miles apart, according to my tastes. They're both handsome enough to look at, though.

ivape 1y ago

The problem is there is a mindfuck dynamic the arena of taste brings. Popular taste can overwhelm all other taste. A society may not even know they’ve lost taste for a significant amount of time.

literalAardvark 1y ago
[flagged]
- titzer 1y ago
  The most accessible design is not picking colors at all, but letting users or user agents pick the color scheme and only providing the content.
  - hypertele-Xii 1y ago
    Deferring such decisions to the end user is an ABSENCE of design.
    - titzer 1y ago
      Partly! And that's a good thing, IMO. E.g. providing just the content (think markdown, e.g.) and letting the end user agent render it in a standard way that the user wants is what I had in mind. Like good ole HTML from 1995 :)
  - evilduck 1y ago
    That's conflating content and design. Also, where else are these expectations in society? I think accessible websites are important for equitable access to content, services and tools for those with disabilities, but nobody provides "content only" designs for concert posters where the user is expected to create their own art around it. Nobody who is making a movie supplies the script as the only creative output for the market. Nobody dumps a plaintext unformatted version of a book or research paper expecting you to format it yourself. Nobody creates a comic book which consists only the speech bubbles. Nobody should be expected to produce web sites that are just content.
    - titzer 1y ago
      It's interesting that you provide movie posters as an example. That's literally advertising. At some point the web evolved from being a simple text-based document format to becoming animated, linkable magazines and an endless barrage of advertising. It evolved to look pretty to entertain and entice people, not to inform them. > Nobody dumps a plaintext unformatted version of a book or research paper expecting you to format it yourself. Have you read a novel? It's just text in paragraphs. > Nobody should be expected to produce web sites that are just content. I think you're taking an extreme viewpoint. Have a look at all the markdown on GitHub. Clearly markdown is great for a lot of content. It isn't great for a lot of marketing.
      - evilduck 1y ago
        You're taking the extreme view that I mentioned an ad and that invalidated the rest of the examples. Try not cherry picking? >Have you read a novel? It's just text in paragraphs. I take offense to this attack. Have _you_ ever opened a novel? Typesetting matters a whole lot. Go convert an novel's .epub to .txt and ditch all of the fancy design, read it start to finish and tell me it's the same quality of experience. It isn't and you know it isn't. Hell, even different size prints of the same book are differently enjoyable. Your rants about ads do not invalidate the merits of design.
  - tsunamifury 1y ago
    This is ad absurdum. “The best design is doing nothing at all!” Ok
- watwut 1y ago
  Colorblind have more issues distinguishing shades including shades of grade. These are made by people who see colors too well.
  - b112 1y ago
    Or people who turn the brightness up on their monitor to "make the sun look dim in comparison". My TV has its backlight set to '0' (OLED, and a non-real property to set as no 'backlight', but still a metric). If I set it to 100 my eyes bleed. My current monitor with a real backlight has it set to 5. Yes, 5 out of 100. I think grey on grey works, if the very walls behind you are being bleached by the intensity of the light coming off the monitor.
    - whstl 1y ago
      And those monitors aren't any monitors, they're glossy expensive Apple monitors.
- MisterTea 1y ago
  As someone who is colorblind and has some vision issues I take offense to that as I struggle with those design choices. It's clear someone with the ability to distinguish color and clarity designs those sites with no consideration for others.
- Aerroon 1y ago
  The grey UI aspect gets even worse when you use it on certain monitors. It's not that the greys even blend together, no, they are the same color. Looking at you, light mode discord.
- squigz 1y ago
  In what world are colourblind designers making grey-on-grey UIs? This is a wild statement, and this phrasing... > You don't have to drag everyone to your level in the name of accessibility. is gross.

b112 1y ago

Like it or not, tastes change. Both the personal and society's tastes. If you look back through the past, you can see some horrid design choices. Thus, some designs we think as awesome right now, will be seen as horrid to our descendants. So if that's true, what if taste is social? And if it's social, then... well, all people have is peer pressure taste. And your words show the truth in this, to a degree. Pre-curated options, to ensure "good taste" in choice. And how style conveys social status in some capacity, I don't mean "this style means success" but "this style means you have good taste". Hair styles can be described as "taste", just as a taste in clothing. Yet hair styles suddenly become "ugly" where a decade before they were "tasteful". Even beauty changes. One century it's skin and bones, the next more corpulent. Sometimes it's muscular, other times slim. It's all peer pressure, all social status.

paulryanrogers 1y ago
There seems to be an element of familiarity too. What was considered 'cool' when one is a teenager becomes an anchor of sorts. Even if society moves on, there will be a cohort who holds on to the era which made the deepest impression on them.
dgfitz 1y ago
I had taste before it was cool! > It's all peer pressure, all social status. You nailed it here. having 'taste' is a completely subjective concept driven mostly by the 'market-makers' of whatever industry. Your 'taste' is determined by the judgment of others.
nothrabannosir 1y ago
Some tastes change but not _all_ tastes change. This is a common misconception in conversations about taste: “some of it is subjective therefore it must all be 100% subjective and meaningless”. Yet when this comes round to something you’re good at (music, painting, literature, cooking, sport, …) you immediately recognize that there are in fact timeless elements. Universal truths, which are characterized as subjective only by those who cannot see it. Elements of taste are subjective. Not all of it. You recognize this yourself in your own area of skill. Everyone has one area where suddenly they agree not every opinion has equal merit, and can articulate why. But move out of that subject and into one of their blind spots, and we’re right back to “that’s just taste, taste is subjective, taste changes over time.” Subjectivity is the refuge of the tasteless, who can afford to let others do our thinking for us. GP was right on point in that regard.

pxc 1y ago

Most software I find to provide a smooth, gratifying UX has been carefully designed, but not by a designer. The Fish and Elvish shells have designs involving lots of small, tasteful choices that add up. `fd` refines the traditional Unix `find` CLI in a ton of ways that reflect "good taste" and at the same time brings it more in line with the conventional long and short options of most GNU CLI utilities, including reducing dependence on ordering/positions of arguments. On the other hand, apart from a few odd GUI disasters, it seems every piece of software I've used that has a UI I hate has had one or more designers behind it. Is there even a "haute couture" school of design for interfaces other than GUIs? Are there designers who design for the experiences of people who are visually impaired short of totally blind? It seems to me that virtually no trained designers care about what actually makes computing experiences useful or pleasant for me, let alone beautiful. (And they often devote an inordinate amount of energy to things I'd say don't matter at all.)

tsunamifury 1y ago
Yea coherent systems are satisfying. Command line or Ui really has nothing to do with it. That’s about usability. Which is entirely different.
- pxc 1y ago
  I'm potentially interested in formally studying HCI, but I'm a little worried that my classes will all be filled with visual design people I can't relate to, and that my classes will contain general recommendations that don't apply to users like me, or even make software more difficult to use for me.
  - tsunamifury 1y ago
    First, I would suggest your mentality is a bit... funny as you're saying you want to learn but NOT LIKE THAT. But as someone who did HCI at Berkeley/Stanford and teach it currently, it is a LOT more technical and heuristic driven than just 'designerlyness" So you know, do it, but like also... try to branch out and learn too.

interroboink 1y ago

I haven't read the article, so just speaking generally... (and not meaning to contradict you, just thinking aloud) I think there's some overlap between "taste" and "thinking for yourself" — though they are not the same thing. Lots of people don't want to think for themselves in every teeny aspect of life, so choosing from a menu of "good enough" options is reasonable. It doesn't mean they lack taste, just that they lack the energy/interest/etc in that moment for that activity. Another aspect: plenty of people will know whether they like something when they see it, but they won't be able to describe what they want beforehand. So, they have taste (ability to choose a good one), but not an ability to enunciate it, or conjure it out of thin air. Also, the "taste" terminology is often intertwined with "style", and I think that's unnecessarily limiting. An "engineer's taste" might help them decide between gadgets and gizmos, based on their merits, even if they're both ugly. To your last example, I think modern Lodge cast iron frying pans are mediocre. Not because of ugliness/prettiness, but because the sharp ridge/seam on the handle from the casting process is not ground down. It makes it uncomfortable to hold. Also, the cooking surface is left rough. Compare it to an old Griswold — miles apart, according to my tastes. They're both handsome enough to look at, though.