Developing a team's creative taste isn't abstract. It's a trainable skill built by establishing a ritual of reviewing great, average, and poor creative examples side-by-side. This process of comparison and discussion calibrates the entire team on what quality looks like.
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If your execution skills are still developing, focus on demonstrating strong design taste. Find portfolios you admire and deconstruct them, asking why specific choices were made around spacing, color, and timing. This process builds your design intuition and signals to hiring managers that you have a high quality bar and are coachable.
Like sleep, creativity is a non-conscious process that can't be forced. Instead of demanding ideas, leaders should practice "creativity hygiene." This involves arranging conscious behaviors to facilitate creative output, such as seeking novelty, embracing ambiguity, and building the team's creative confidence.
To cultivate strong design taste without formal training, immerse yourself in best-in-class products. Actively analyze their details, from menus to spacing, and ask *why* they work. This reverse-engineering process builds intuition and raises your personal quality bar faster than theoretical study alone.
To maintain a high creative output, Savannah Bananas founder Jesse Cole writes 10 new ideas every day. Crucially, he often focuses these sessions on a specific "idea bucket" or theme, such as developing characters for a new team. This transforms creativity from a sporadic event into a consistent, directed practice.
Technical talent is not the primary driver of resonant creative work. The key ingredient is 'taste'—an unteachable ability to discern what will be emotionally pleasing and impactful to an audience. This intuitive sense separates good creators from great ones.
To accelerate design skill, seek out blunt feedback from practitioners you respect. Go beyond high-level user feedback and ask for a "roast" on the visual details. The goal is to get concrete, actionable advice—even down to specific CSS classes—to refine your taste and execution.
To avoid generic brainstorming outcomes, use AI as a filter for mediocrity. Ask a tool like ChatGPT for the top 10 ideas on a topic, and then explicitly remove those common suggestions from consideration. This forces the team to bypass the obvious and engage in more original, innovative thinking.
Teams can cultivate a shared sense of taste by encouraging constant and rigorous critique of both internal and external work. This process allows the team to self-regulate, learn from each other, and elevate their collective craft without top-down mandates.
Before starting a project, define its intended feel with key adjectives (e.g., "techie," "classical," "sharp"). This vision becomes a powerful filter, helping you make consistent decisions and resist the temptation to chase trends or get discouraged by other designers' work.
Expertise isn't just having "taste." It evolves from exposure (what's good/bad) to analysis (why it's good/bad), and finally to mastery (how to improve it). This framework applies to any creative or intellectual domain, from design to code, helping founders evaluate their own skills.
