But your reaction to a color also depends heavily on where you live, where you were raised, and the context within which you experience that color. In China, red means luck and fortune. In the United States, red represents danger; it means to be alert or to stop. If you walk into a red room as someone from China, you might feel lucky; in the United

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While it’s probably one of the corniest things I’ll ever write in this column, I’ve come to believe that developing taste is not so unlike going to therapy; it’s an inefficient, time-consuming process that mostly entails looking inward and identifying whatever already moves you. It’s the product of devouring ideas, images and pieces of culture not... See more

Like many writers before me, I tend to lean on vague hand-waving when the need to define taste, or rather, good taste, arises. A common trope is to use the phrase US Supreme Court justice Stewart famously gave to describe obscenity, a similarly hard-to-describe bedfellow of taste, in 1964: “I know it when I see it.” In design, good taste can be... See more