Teaching Taste

Teach judgment, not your personal style.

How to use

• /teaching-taste Apply 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)