Taste Is the Value in the Age of Artificial Intelligence
AI does not have taste. Designers do. And that difference is everything.
Today, business is finally waking up to the value of design. A well-designed product is not just a nice-to-have; it shapes markets, builds trust, and drives growth. But what often gets overlooked is the deeper value of the designer. That value is not just the ability to make things look good. It is taste.
Taste is the filter. It is what allows a designer to take a thousand possibilities and know which one matters. It is not a gift. It is a skill that is trained, practiced, and earned.
What Taste Really Means
People love to say, “beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” But that idea sells design short. Beauty is partly subjective since we all respond differently, but it is also grounded in objective principles like balance, proportion, rhythm, and clarity. Break them and something feels off, no matter who you are.
Taste is the ability to navigate between the two. It is knowing when the principles line up with the feeling, when a design has crossed from fine to inevitable.
Mondrian as Proof
Piet Mondrian understood this better than most. His iconic grids of color may look effortless, but X-rays show a battlefield underneath with scraped-off paint, abandoned lines, and whole sections redone. Mondrian did not improvise; he iterated, shifted, and refined until the work struck that balance of principle and feeling.
That was not luck. That was taste in action.
What AI Exposes
AI has made this truth impossible to ignore. It can generate a hundred “good enough” designs in seconds. At first glance, that might suggest design is subjective, that you can pick whichever one you like. But the reality is the opposite. The more options AI produces, the more important taste becomes.
The challenge is no longer making. It is choosing. Most AI outputs are fine. But fine is not beauty. Fine does not last.
The Value of the Designer
This is where the value of the designer comes in. Tools can generate. Businesses can recognize the value of design. But only a designer with taste can decide what belongs, what resonates, and what endures.
That is the real differentiator. And in an era of infinite choice, it is priceless.