Parliament: Can Taste Be Taught?
Written by Bri Thomas, Creative Director.
Every fall, my husband does his annual clothing haul, and every fall I offer my unsolicited review. This year I noticed something. He bought the same jogger-style pant he has been buying since I mentioned, about four years ago, that they would be a good option for him.
He took the suggestion. He just never let go of it.
I don't think it has crossed his mind that the cut has aged out. He found something comfortable that works, and as far as he's concerned, the decision is closed. Probably for good.
My husband is one of the smartest people I know. He has a PhD and studies medicine, and his ability to process information and think critically is top-notch. His brain simply isn't scanning for this. It took me a while to realize that the corner of my brain that constantly notices when something is slightly off, or quietly right, is not a corner everyone uses. You could call it a lot of things. The most accurate word I've found is taste.
Four years ago, I influenced his taste. I gave him a good answer and he adopted it. What I couldn't give him was the instinct to notice when that answer stopped being good, and I'm not convinced that part can be taught. It can be nurtured over years of looking closely at things. But a rule like "wear joggers" gets followed long after it expires, because the rule was never the point. The judgment behind it was.
That distinction is the one I keep coming back to in conversations about AI and creative work.
AI is very good at rules. It learns from what already exists and hands back a confident version of it. In that sense, it's my husband four years ago: it can take a good answer and apply it indefinitely.
What AI can't do is sense the moment an answer has gone stale, or recognize that a particular brand needs to go somewhere the existing work hasn't been yet.
It also learns from us. If most people don't use that corner of their brain, a model trained on the sum of what people make is going to land somewhere near the average. The average is fine for plenty of things. It's rarely what makes a brand worth remembering. A tool can only be as discerning as the person directing it, and when that person doesn't bring taste to the prompt, the output won't find any on its own.
I'm not anti-optimization. Hoot uses these tools, and we're as caught up in the push for efficiency as anyone. But optimizing only works on something worth optimizing. Someone has to do the original thinking first, deciding what the brand stands for and what it should never look like. That groundwork takes a person with real brand awareness, and those people are rarer than the job titles suggest.
DIY culture has never been bigger. Between the economy and TikTok, there are more self-titled creative directors now than at any point in my career. I don't say that to be condescending. The tools are accessible, the tutorials are free, and plenty of people have real talent. If you look at a piece of design and think "I could probably do that," you might be right.
The more useful question is whether you should. Making the thing has gotten easy. Knowing which thing to make, and noticing when it has quietly gone out of date, has not.
That's what you're paying for when you hire a creative partner: taste that has been sharpened on real brands and held accountable to real results. It's the part of the work that never shows up in the file, and it's what keeps your brand from wearing the same joggers for the next ten years.
Bri Thomas is the Creative Director at Hoot Design Company.
