Taste for Makers

If you mention taste nowadays, a lot of people will tell you that "taste is subjective." They believe this because it really feels that way to them. When they like something, they have no idea why. It could be because it's beautiful, or because their mother had one, or because they saw a movie star with one in a magazine, or because they know it's ... See more

a painting that suggests is usually more engaging than one that tells. Everyone makes up their own story about the Mona Lisa.

If you're not working hard, you're probably wasting your time.

As a practical matter, I think it's easier to see ugliness than to imagine beauty. Most of the people who've made beautiful things seem to have done it by fixing something that they thought ugly. Great work usually seems to happen because someone sees something and thinks,

I could do better than that.

Strangely enough, if you want to make something that will appeal to future generations, one way to do it is to try to appeal to past generations.

Relativism is fashionable at the moment, and that may hamper you from thinking about taste, even as yours grows. But if you come out of the closet and admit, at least to yourself, that there is such a thing as good and bad design, then you can start to study good design in detail. How has your taste changed? When you made mistakes, what caused you ... See more

The only style worth having is the one you can't help.

Good design is often slightly funny.

This one may not always be true. But Durer's

engravings

and Saarinen's

womb chair

and the

Pantheon

and the original

Porsche 911

all seem to me slightly funny. Godel's incompleteness theorem seems like a practical joke.

I think it's because humor is related to strength. To have a sense of humor is to be strong: to kee... See more

The easy, conversational tone of good writing comes only on the eighth rewrite.

To have a sense of humor is to be strong: to keep one's sense of humor is to shrug off misfortunes, and to lose one's sense of humor is to be wounded by them. And so the mark-- or at least the prerogative-- of strength is not to take oneself too seriously. The confident will often, like swallows, seem to be making fun of the whole process slightly,... See more