Leave Room for Taste

I.

I want a website to work. I also want to enjoy looking at it.

Apparently this is a complicated position.

Talk long enough about marketing and somebody will ask you to defend a typeface as though it has been caught stealing from the company. What does it convert? How much revenue does the extra space produce? Could we fit another button there?

We probably could. We could fit buttons almost everywhere. The internet has been exploring that possibility for years.

I care about results. I also think we can become so determined to prove the value of every individual decision that we lose the ability to judge the thing we made.

II.

Look at a room you like being in.

The light, the furniture, the distance between things. Someone made decisions that work together. You might not know enough about architecture to name them. You still know how the room feels.

Now imagine evaluating that room one object at a time, without ever standing inside it.

The chair is comfortable. The lamp is bright. The table is a very competitive price. Every purchase can be defended. Somehow the room feels like a dentist’s office that acquired a startup.

That’s an imagined room, but the problem is real enough to recognize. Individually reasonable decisions can produce a confused whole.

Taste involves noticing the whole. It requires you to care about relationships that are difficult to explain in a list of deliverables.

III.

There’s an obvious escape hatch here, and I don’t want to take it.

Calling something “taste” doesn’t make it immune to criticism. A designer can love a page that nobody can read. An owner can insist on a color because it was on the first business card. A clever animation can make a basic task exhausting.

You still have to explain the choice.

The larger headline establishes what matters first. The quieter background makes the work easier to see. The shorter form respects what we actually need to start a conversation. These are reasons another person can consider, even before there is enough behavior to measure.

“Because I like it” can begin the discussion. It shouldn’t be the only sentence available.

And if the person trying to use the thing keeps getting stuck, your beautiful explanation has some work to do.

IV.

What interests me is the space between blind preference and impossible certainty.

That’s where most creative decisions live.

You have experience. You have examples. You understand what the business is trying to communicate. You can look at two versions and explain why one feels more coherent, more confident, or easier to understand.

You still might be wrong.

I don’t think that disqualifies you from deciding. It means you should keep paying attention after the decision leaves your screen.

The alternative is waiting until every choice arrives with proof attached. By then, you’re mostly choosing things that already exist. There’s less risk of having to explain yourself, but there’s also less chance of making something with a point of view.

I’d rather have a reasoned choice we can learn from than a committee-approved absence of choice.

V.

For a business owner, the useful question is whether your team can explain what deserves attention and what should stay quiet.

If every section is urgent, nothing has priority. If every line sounds impressive, none of it sounds like a person. If every service gets equal space at the top of the page, the visitor gets to do the sorting you avoided.

Ask the team to show you the page as a whole. Then ask what they want someone to understand first, what supports that understanding, and what they deliberately left out.

The last question tells you quite a bit.

Good judgment includes being willing to remove something you worked hard on because the finished thing is better without it. That can sting. You don’t have to pretend it’s effortless.

You do have to care more about the result than the hours you want someone to notice.

VI.

I like work that gives you something before it asks for something.

A little clarity. A moment of interest. The sense that someone paid attention and made decisions on purpose.

That doesn’t excuse a broken form or a confusing offer. It makes me want to bring the same attention to those parts, too. The way something feels and the way it functions belong in the same conversation.

So yes, measure the page. Watch people use it. Change what needs changing.

But leave enough room for a person with judgment to make something worth measuring.

The spreadsheet can join us. It doesn’t need to pick the typeface.