This essay deeply explores 'good taste' and the objective principles of design that cut across programming, mathematics, art, and more. Taste is never a mere subjective preference; creating great work requires understanding and training in shared principles like simplicity, timelessness, and naturalness. Ultimately, great work is born from a keen eye that identifies existing 'ugliness' and a maker's relentless effort to improve it.
1. Reflections on Taste and Beauty
A friend teaching at MIT lamented that graduate applicants seemed smart but he couldn't tell if they had "taste." What he truly wanted were students who could use their technical knowledge to design beautiful things. Mathematicians, scientists, engineers, musicians, architects, designers, writers, and painters all describe great work as "beautiful." If there's an intersection, can principles from one field apply to another?
2. Is Taste Really Subjective?
People say taste is subjective because their preferences feel tangled -- genuine beauty mixed with childhood nostalgia and celebrity endorsements. But once you start designing things, you discover this isn't true. As your skills improve, your taste changes. Recognizing your past taste was not just "different" but "worse" shatters the idea that "there's no wrong in taste." That admission opens the door to studying good design.
3. Fourteen Principles of Good Design
- Simple: Forced simplicity confronts the real problem when you can't hide behind decoration.
- Timeless: Aiming for timelessness forces you to find the best answer and escape fashion's trap.
- Solves the right problem: Stove dials in a row is a simple answer to the wrong question; arrange them like the burners.
- Suggestive: Like Jane Austen's sparse visual description that lets readers imagine scenes, provide building blocks users can combine.
- Slightly funny: Masters have the confidence to gently mock the process rather than be overwhelmed by it.
- Hard: Great work requires tremendous effort. Constraints force elegance, like wild animals shaped by harsh lives.
- Looks easy: The effortless tone of great writing is actually the result of eight rewrites. Practice pushes conscious work into the unconscious.
- Uses symmetry: Nature loves symmetry. Recursive structures (patterns within sub-elements) are especially powerful in math and engineering.
- Resembles nature: Not because naturalness is inherently good, but because nature has worked on these problems far longer than we have.
- Is redesign: Rarely perfect on the first try. Experts plan for plans to change. Leonardo invented sketching to endure countless explorations.
- Can copy: The greatest masters care more about getting the right answer than being original -- they'll borrow without hesitation if someone else found part of it first.
- Often strange: The best works are not just beautiful but oddly peculiar -- though this strangeness can't be forced.
- Happens in chunks: Leonardo needed 1450s Florence. Communities of talented people working on related problems are more powerful than anything.
- Is daring: Every era has absurd beliefs people cling to. Today's experimental error is tomorrow's theory. To discover great things, pay special attention where conventional wisdom and truth don't quite align.
4. The Secret to Great Work
Practically, finding ugliness is far easier than imagining beauty. Most people who created beautiful things thought something existing was intolerably ugly and worked to fix it. Giotto found traditional Byzantine paintings unnaturally stiff; Copernicus couldn't tolerate the clumsy astronomical system his contemporaries accepted.
"I can do better than that."
Great work usually starts with this thought. But simply being intolerant of ugliness isn't enough -- you must deeply understand the field to smell exactly what needs fixing.
The secret to great work: very exacting taste, and the ability to satisfy it.