Develop Your Taste.
It’s pretty much all we have left.
These days pretty much anyone can make something resembling a logo. My kids can make a logo before their mid-morning snack. Canva can hand ‘em a template that looks 75% professional-ish, and if they aren’t feeling it they can tap into AI to generate forty more directions by lunch. (Thankfully they don’t… they’re both anti-AI, which is a topic for another post.) But anyway… it’s not my job to come here and tell you the tools are bad. Some are, of course. Evil, even. But some of them are annoyingly good.
Which makes me think to myself… what exactly am I selling anymore?
Recently I spent a considerable amount of time kerning two letters. Capital W and a capital A, side by side in a logotype. Nudge the a in… too tight… now it’s a ligature nobody asked for. Back it off… too loose, now the word has a gap tooth. And it looks weird. Is that even how you spell it? Weird. Go make a sandwich. Come back and stare at it like it’s a suspect in a lineup. Something’s off. Turn it upside down (an old trick I learned from a design professor of mine). Wow yeah that’s way off. Apply some math… nope. Trust my judgment and eyes. Okay where was I?
The client wouldn’t have flagged that wonky spacing in a hundred years. By every measurable standard, the logotype was just fine before I obsessed over it.
But fine wasn’t my assignment. And the gap between fine and right is, I’m realizing, basically my entire business model now. Which is a weird thing to admit. It’s hard to put that on a website. It doesn’t really work as a sexy one-liner.
Some people call this taste, and I used to loathe that word because it sounds like something you’re born with, or something you tell yourself you have in order to sound better than everyone else. It’s neither of those. Taste is mostly scar tissue. It’s the design style I was obsessed with in the late ‘90s that I now cross the street to avoid. It’s every time a client said “make it pop” and I made it pop and it got worse, and I had to sit there and reverse-engineer what they were actually trying to tell me. (Spoiler alert: I have a book about this very topic coming out soon.) Thirty-plus years of being bothered by things… that’s been my education. Nobody hands you a diploma in “taste.” One day you just notice you can’t un-see bad letterspacing on a plumber’s van, and congratulations, you’re ruined forever, and also now you’re useful.
Here’s this week’s hot take on the whole AI-is-coming-for-us thing. Generating stuff was never the hard part. I could always crank out forty logo options. Any designer worth hiring can. We just figured out a long time ago that forty options is a punishment, not a service… handing a client forty logos is handing them your job and keeping the invoice. The actual work is looking at the forty and knowing thirty-nine of ‘em are wrong. Not feeling it, knowing it, and being able to say why in words the client can understand. The tools can make things all day long. But they’ve never once refused a thing. Refusal isn’t in their vocabulary, and refusal honestly is most of what I do these days.
And there’s a second layer under that one, which I think matters even more. When I tell a client “this one, not those,” my name is attached to that decision. If the sign looks wrong hanging over their door for the next decade, that’s on me, and they know where I live. But a template doesn’t have to live with the choice. A prompt doesn’t take the call when the packaging feels off on the shelf. Somewhere in the fee, whether we say it or not, the client is paying for a person to be responsible for the choosing. That’s a real thing. It might be the realest thing left. Jesus it might be all that’s left in this industry anymore… accountability.
So if you’re earlier in this than me and wondering how you get taste… you don’t get it, you grow it, and the growing is stupidly unglamorous. Just look at more things than feels reasonable. Make more things than feels reasonable. And pay attention to the little itch, the thing that bugs you before you can explain why it bugs you. Don’t skip past the itch. Sit in it. Ask it questions.
It takes years. It compounds slowly and it transfers badly.
Which, if you think about it, is exactly what makes it worth paying for.