Taste is pattern recognition dressed up as intuition. You're not born with it. You build it through deliberate practice. The more patterns you collect, the better your taste becomes. No luck required. So how do you actually get taste?
Collect patterns: Curate a swipe file of everything that catches your eye. Great copy, clean UI, collect them all.
Observe what's good: When you see something great, ask yourself: "How did they build that?" Don't just admire good design or smooth experiences. Reverse engineer them. What choices did they make? What did they say no to? This curiosity transforms passive consumption into active learning.
Note down what's bad: Write friction logs for everything that annoys you. When something feels clunky, broken, or just off, document it. What exactly went wrong? Why did it feel bad? The teams at Resend use this to systematically improve their product. You can use it to train your eye for what doesn't work.
Practice by imitating: Do copy work to find your voice. Pick someone you admire and recreate their work. Not to steal it, but to understand how they think. The more you copy, the more you notice where you naturally diverge. That's where your style lives.
Execute quickly: Outline everything recursively, then iterate at lightning speed. Break your project into parts. Break those into smaller parts until everything is bite-sized. Fill it all in as fast as you can. Only when it's done do you go back and make it good. This approach beats starting at the top and grinding through line by line.