Taste is a system

People talk about taste like it is a gift. It is not. It is a system: look at a thousand good things, write down what they have in common, and check your own work against the list.

I keep a design playbook with hundreds of entries. Every site I admire gets dissected: the type sizes, the spacing, the one interaction that makes it memorable. Then the tricks get names, and the names go in the book.

The book does not make decisions for me. It makes my decisions faster and harder to get wrong. Taste, it turns out, is mostly just organized attention.

Start your own. Steal deliberately, credit honestly, and never ship something you could not explain.