This essay explores "good taste" and the objective principles of design across fields as diverse as programming, mathematics, and painting. Taste is never merely subjective preference; to create excellent work, one must understand and train in common principles such as simplicity, timelessness, and naturalness. The central message is that great work is born from a sharp eye that finds existing ugliness intolerable, and from the creator's relentless effort to improve it.

1. Reflections on Taste and Beauty

"...One of the essential motivations that led Copernicus to reject the Ptolemaic system was [his] aesthetic objection to [the equant]...." - Thomas Kuhn, The Copernican Revolution

"We were all trained by Kelly Johnson and believed fanatically in his theory that an airplane that looks beautiful will fly the same way." - Ben Rich, Skunk Works

"Beauty is the first test: there is no permanent place in the world for ugly mathematics." - G. H. Hardy, A Mathematician's Apology

I was recently talking with a friend who teaches at MIT. His field is very popular these days, and graduate applications pour in every year. He told me the applicants seem smart, but "he can't tell whether they have any taste." 🧐

We don't hear the word "taste" much anymore. But whatever we call it, the underlying concept still matters. What my friend really wanted wasn't merely technically capable students — he wanted students who could use their technical knowledge to design beautiful things.

Mathematicians, scientists, engineers, musicians, architects, designers, writers, and painters all use the word "beautiful" to describe great work. Is it a coincidence that they all reach for the same word? If there is a common core to what each field means by beauty, can we apply principles discovered in one field to others? For those of us who make things, this is not merely a theoretical question. It is a deeply practical one: "How do you make something good?" 🎨

2. Is Taste Really Subjective?

If you talk to people about taste today, nine out of ten will say "taste is subjective." It feels that way. People often don't know why they like something — it might genuinely be beautiful, or it might be because their mother used it, or because they saw a celebrity with it in a magazine. Their opinions are a tangle of unexamined impulses.

We grow up being encouraged not to pull those impulses apart. If you tease your younger sibling for coloring people green in a coloring book, your mother will typically say, "You like to do it your way and he likes to do it his way." She isn't trying to teach you a deep truth about aesthetics — she just wants you to stop fighting. 😅

Like many of the half-truths adults tell us, this one contradicts what they say in other contexts. After telling you for years that taste is just personal preference, they take you to a museum and say, "Leonardo was a great artist — pay attention." A kid who has been told everyone just likes things their own way will have a hard time concluding that a great artist made better work than others. More likely they'll think of great art as something good for them, like broccoli, because someone said so in a book.

Saying taste is merely personal preference is a great way to avoid arguments. The problem is it isn't true. The moment you start designing and making things yourself, you feel this directly.

Whatever you do, you naturally want to get better at it. A soccer player wants to win games; a CEO wants to increase revenue. But if your job is to design things and there is no such thing as beauty, there is no way to improve. If taste is purely subjective, everyone's taste is already perfect.

Yet as you keep designing, your skills improve. Your taste changes. When you realize you've improved, you find yourself acknowledging that your old taste was not merely different — it was worse. The claim that "there are no wrong tastes" shatters. Once you admit this to yourself, the door opens to studying good design in earnest. 🚪

3. Fourteen Principles That Good Design Shares

When you dig deep into this question, you find it remarkable how much the "beauty" recognized across different fields has in common. The principles of great design recur again and again, regardless of discipline.

1. Good design is simple

You hear this in mathematics, in painting, everywhere. In math, a shorter proof is a better proof. The same is true in programming. In architecture and design, beauty should depend on a few carefully chosen structural elements rather than superficial, ornate decoration. In writing, saying what you mean simply and directly is best. When doing creative work, people often hide behind flashy decoration or convoluted language because they fear their substance is thin. But when you force yourself to be simple, you face the real problem. When decoration is off the table, you have to deliver the goods.

2. Good design is timeless

If something is ugly, it cannot be the best solution — someone will eventually find a better one. Aiming for timelessness is a way of pushing yourself toward the best answer. It is also a way of escaping the trap of fashion. If you want to make something appealing to people far in the future, paradoxically, try to make something that would also appeal to people far in the past. The distant past and the distant future are alike in being indifferent to present-day trends. ⏳

3. Good design solves the right problem

A typical gas stove has four burners arranged in a square. How should the control knobs be arranged? The simplest answer is in a row — but that is a simple answer to the wrong question, because users have to figure out which knob controls which burner every time. Arranging the knobs in a matching square solves the actual problem.

4. Good design is suggestive

Jane Austen's novels contain almost no visual description. Instead, she tells the story so well that readers imagine the scenes themselves. Viewers of the Mona Lisa each invent their own story. In software, too, it is good to give users basic elements they can combine as they like — building blocks, like Lego.

5. Good design is slightly funny

Not always, but great design often has an odd humor to it. Dürer's engravings, Saarinen's Womb Chair, the Pantheon, and the original Porsche 911 all have something slightly playful about them. Humor is connected to strength. Supremely confident masters are not overwhelmed by what they are doing — they have enough ease to gently mock the whole enterprise.

6. Good design is hard

What great achievers have in common is that they worked enormously hard. If you're not sweating, you're probably wasting your time. 💦 Difficult constraints — harsh terrain, a shoestring budget — force designers to strip away what is unnecessary and arrive at something elegant. It is the same reason wild animals, hardened by brutal lives, end up with beautiful bodies.

7. Good design looks easy

Great athletes and great designers make everything look effortless. But it is an illusion. The relaxed, conversational tone in a fine piece of writing is the result of eight drafts. With enough practice, tasks that once required conscious thought migrate to the unconscious — like a spinal reflex. Your conscious mind is then free to tackle harder, more important problems.

8. Good design uses symmetry

Nature relies on symmetry constantly. There are two kinds: repetition and recursion. Recursive structures, where a pattern repeats in subcomponents (like the veins of a leaf), are especially powerful tools in mathematics and engineering. Part of what makes the Eiffel Tower visually striking is its recursive structure — a tower upon a tower.

9. Good design resembles nature

It isn't that resembling nature is inherently good; it's that nature has spent far longer than we have working on the same problems. Early ship hulls look like animal ribcages for this reason. If your solution resembles nature's solution, that is a good sign. 🌿

10. Good design is redesign

Getting it right the first time is rare. Experts expect to discard some early work and plan for plans to change. Being willing to throw things out requires confidence: "I have plenty more ideas where that came from." Don't treat mistakes as catastrophes — build an environment where mistakes are easy to acknowledge and fix. Leonardo da Vinci invented the sketch precisely to survive the countless explorations and false starts.

11. Good design can copy

Taste develops in three stages: 1) the novice who imitates without knowing it, 2) the intermediate who strains consciously to be original, and 3) the master who realizes that being right matters more than being original. The greatest masters reach a kind of flow state. They just want the right answer, and if someone else has already found part of it, they use it without hesitation. They have enough confidence in their own vision that borrowing from others doesn't threaten it.

12. Good design is often strange

The greatest works — Euler's formula, Pieter Bruegel's Hunters in the Snow, the SR-71 — are not just beautiful; they have something distinctly odd about them. But this strangeness cannot be faked. Einstein wasn't trying to make relativity strange; he was just trying to find the truth, and the truth happened to be strange. A style that seeps out inevitably because you are trying to do something right is worth infinitely more than contrived originality.

13. Good design happens in chunks

Fifteenth-century Florence produced Leonardo, Michelangelo, Botticelli, and many other geniuses. Milan was just as large at the time — so why can't we name a single Milanese genius from that era? Genes alone cannot produce a Leonardo da Vinci. He needed the Florence of 1450. Nothing is more powerful than a community of talented people wrestling with related problems together. Great work — like that of the Bauhaus or Skunk Works — erupts in concentrated hotspots.

14. Good design is daring

In every era, people have held absurd beliefs that couldn't be questioned without risking social ostracism or violence. Is our time any different? Probably not. Today's experimental error is tomorrow's new theory. If you want to discover great things, never look away from the places where conventional wisdom and the truth seem subtly at odds — pay special attention to exactly those places. 🚀

4. The Secret to Great Work, for Makers

From a practical standpoint, it is much easier to notice ugliness than to imagine beauty. Most people who made beautiful things started by feeling that something existing was far too ugly, and produced something great in the process of fixing it. Giotto found the stiff, wooden Byzantine Madonnas that had satisfied everyone for centuries unbearably unnatural. Copernicus couldn't tolerate the clumsy astronomical system his contemporaries accepted without complaint, and went looking for a better one.

"I could do better than that."

Great work usually begins when someone has this thought. But merely being unable to stand ugliness isn't enough. To smell out exactly what needs fixing, you must understand the field deeply — you have to do the homework.

As you become an expert in a field, you'll begin to hear a small voice inside: "This is a mess! There has to be a better way."

Never ignore that voice. Nurture it carefully.

The secret to great work is just this: very exacting taste, and the ability to satisfy it.