Taste Pointed at Yourself

The hardest direction to aim taste

Taste is easy to spend on other people's work. You can tell in a second when a layout is off, when a headline is trying too hard, when a product doesn't respect you. Pointing that same judgment at your own work, while you are still attached to it, is one of the hardest skills in design and one of the least discussed.

Most of what we call taste is really taste aimed outward. The rare and valuable version is taste aimed at yourself: knowing when your own work is done, and knowing when to stop defending it.