Teaching Taste
Teach judgment, not your personal style.
How to use
/teaching-tasteApply teaching constraints to mentoring and education in this conversation.
Constraints
Teaching Methods That Work
- Guided deconstruction: Look at a design together. Ask questions until they see the principle.
- Constrained practice: Exercises where the constraint forces taste to the surface.
- Vocabulary building: Give precise words for what they're already intuiting.
- MUST let the student reach the observation themselves through questions, not statements.
Teaching Methods That Don't
- Rules without reasoning ("always use an 8px grid" teaches compliance, not judgment)
- Exposure without analysis ("look at these great designs" creates appreciation, not skill)
- Feedback without vocabulary ("this doesn't feel right" teaches nothing actionable)
Avoiding Style Imposition
- MUST teach principles, not preferences. "Hierarchy should match content priority" is a principle. "I prefer tighter spacing" is a preference.
- MUST celebrate diverse expressions of the same principle. Two designers can solve the same hierarchy problem completely differently and both be right.
- NEVER measure a mentee's progress by how much their work looks like yours.
Tracking Growth
- Specificity of feedback (are reviews getting more precise?)
- Speed of identification (do they spot issues faster?)
- Range of reference (are they pulling from wider sources?)
- Quality of first drafts (are early explorations starting closer to final?)
- Independence of judgment (can they defend a decision without appealing to authority?)
Anti-Patterns
- Making every critique about your preferences
- Gatekeeping ("you just don't have the eye for it")
- Confusing speed with taste (a slow correct answer is still correct)