Turning Taste Into Something Other People Can Trust
How personal judgement becomes shared confidence
Hi everyone,
Today I am talking about a topic that’s going on of my ongoing research into taste. Taste as part of an art director’s career, but also how your taste can influence decisions of others. I’ve written a few posts about this before, but I think it’s a topic you could write an entire Substack about.
Before we dive in. A reminder that there are still a few spots available for the Strategic Art Direction Program that I’m running 3 times a year only.
Everyone has taste.
That part is rarely the issue. Taste is shaped early, often before we have language for it. Through what we grew up around, what felt familiar or aspirational, what made us think without knowing why. It lives in the body as much as the mind. A sense of pull and recognition.
Where things start to diverge is not in whether someone has taste, but in whether they’ve learned to recognise it, work with it, and build from it consciously.
When I talk about taste here, I’m not talking about preference. I’m talking about awareness. About being able to see your own patterns clearly enough that they become something you can stand behind as a creative over and over again.
And when taste becomes something other people can trust, it’s no longer just personal. It becomes usable.
Taste exists before language
Psychology has a word for this kind of knowing, it’s ‘Tacit Knowledge’. It’s also known as an understanding that’s difficult to explain, but very real. We recognise it in experts across fields. A surgeon sensing when something is off. A musician knowing when a note lands wrong. A stylist seeing imbalance before being able to describe it.
Visual taste works in a similar way. Before we even articulate it, we feel it. We gravitate towards certain atmospheres, certain energies, certain ways of framing the world. This is why copying someone else’s references never quite works. You can borrow the surface, but not the internal feeling that the original creator once had.
What’s interesting is that this tacit knowledge becomes far more powerful once it’s reflected on. Research into expertise shows that true mastery doesn’t come from instinct alone, but from a loop between intuition and conscious reasoning. Feeling something, then asking why it felt right. Which is not to rationalise it away, but to understand its structure for yourself and start to recognise patterns.
That’s where taste begins to deepen.
From having taste to knowing your taste
Most people move through the world guided by taste without ever naming it. They save images. They admire certain campaigns. They feel drawn to particular designers, directors, or visual eras. All of that is already taste at work.
Knowing your taste is the moment you start noticing the repetition.
You realise that certain moods keep resurfacing. That you’re consistently drawn to tension, or softness, or humour, or bold colours. That your eye keeps returning to similar vibes, even across very different contexts. This is rarely something that happens accidental. It’s often connected to temperament, personality, even nervous system regulation. We tend to feel calm around what we understand intuitively.
Once you see those patterns, you can begin to build from them instead of constantly searching for something new to react to. This is where taste stops being reactive to trends around you and starts becoming directional.
Trust enters when articulation begins
Being trusted for your taste has little to do with being the most original person in the room. It has much more to do with coherence.
When you can articulate your choices, even in simple language, people feel grounded around you. They sense that decisions aren’t random, and that there’s a point of view holding things together.
This doesn’t require long explanations or intellectual ‘performances’. In fact, the most convincing articulation is often quiet. It sounds like clarity and shouldn’t sound like it’s persuasion. A short sentence that frames a choice. A calm explanation of why something belongs. A sense that the decision came from somewhere stable. The less words you’re able to use, the better.
Cognitive psychology shows that humans trust consistency even more than brilliance. We feel safer following someone whose reasoning we can track, even loosely, than someone who feels unpredictable, no matter how talented they are. And taste becomes trustworthy when it behaves predictably over time, even as the output evolves.
Trends should only be used as information
Following trends shouldn’t be seen as a failure of your own taste, some trends can fall directly within your taste and that’s why certain photographers are popular and book many jobs and later disappear a bit to the background only for them to come up later on. But following all trends is a failure of authorship.
Trends are data. They tell us what a culture is paying attention to, what feels relevant, what’s being processed collectively. Ignoring them entirely can lead to isolation. Blindly copying them leads to dilution.
The difference lies in whether trends pass through your taste or replace it.
When you know your own visual logic, trends become raw material. You can engage with them selectively, filtering them through your sensibility instead of reshaping yourself to fit them. This is when work feels current without feeling generic. People sense this instinctively. They can tell when someone is responding thoughtfully versus reacting quickly.