Acquired taste: whose eye is in the tool?

Designers say "taste" when they want to sound irreplaceable. Sven Ellingen's write-up is a little rude to that habit, and I like it for that.

His studio built a tool that suggests brand directions from a brief. The images were weak at first, so they fed it outside references, design principles and about 2,200 images from their own collections. Every keep or reject shapes the next pick. So taste turned out to be partly a collection plus a pile of yeses and nos. "The system still needed our choices," he writes.

Calling it a win is early. "The results improved massively" is his judgment of his own tool, with no blind test and no boards made without it to compare. Also, 2,200 images from one studio is that studio's eye.

Even if models absorb good taste, someone still has to decide what this client should be and answer for it. Saying no is the hard part.