About six years ago, I gave a virtual walkthrough of a design direction to a client of ours at Agathon Group, a large nonprofit. They'd asked me to explore a future iteration of their digital experience and left it pretty wide open. I just ran with it.
The design was anchored in elements of their brand, but it really pushed. I applied my taste to it, and the end result was some of the best work I’ve ever done. It was beautiful. They loved the direction. They felt like the taste was good.
The P&L owner decided not to pursue it.
Have you ever had your best work turned down?
Unless you apply your taste to a where-to-play and how-to-win choice, it’s pretty vacuous.
What did I miss?
The taste and judgment I brought were better in every aspect than their current digital expression, and at the same time they entirely missed the point.
The quality was exceptional, and the design would have drastically repositioned them into a unique spot in their customer and user experience. But it didn’t satisfy the strategic imperatives that were in front of them. It was too big of a leap, and it didn’t provide a clear path for how the organization could make that big of a jump.
Taste has to fit a coherent story or a coherent strategy. Mine didn’t.
Isn’t taste the one thing AI can’t do?
Now that AI can build almost anything, a lot of designers are calling taste the moat. I’d push back.
If you feel like you’re the tastemaker on your team, your aesthetic choices do differentiate you as a designer. They don’t differentiate the business until you apply them to where the business plays and how it wins.
I wrote back in 2012 that art and design differ in purpose and utility. When Charles Eames was asked whether design is an expression of art, he said, “I would rather say it’s an expression of purpose.”
Point your taste at a choice
Before you push a brand forward, ask who the experience is for and how it helps the business win with them. Then ask how the organization gets from where it is today to where your design says it could be. That second question is the one my nonprofit design never answered.
The times my taste has paid off, the research informed it. The aesthetics and design choices were specifically aligned to the user and customer research I had done, and those taste choices created a differentiated and strategic outcome for the organization using the work. [ADD SPECIFIC: one project, one taste choice the research drove, and what it did for the organization, client unnamed if needed]
I wrote earlier this month that when building gets cheap, deciding gets expensive. If you lead a design team, your taste is one of those decisions.
That P&L owner didn’t turn down good taste. They turned down a leap they couldn’t see how to make, and I hadn’t designed the way across.
