Mastery Is More Than Tooling

Becoming an expert in any creative field takes time. You need to understand the material, learn the mechanics, and master the tools. Artificial intelligence has not changed that equation. Technical skill alone isn't the differentiator; the real work is developing a unique way of seeing. That process never really concludes.

Loredana Crisan, Chief Design Officer at Figma, draws a direct line between her early training as a pianist and sound engineer and her current work in product design. Playing music wasn't about hitting the right notes. It was about phrasing, dynamics, and timing — the choices that make a performance communicate emotion. The question was always why a particular choice was made. The same logic applies to design: you build creative intuition through practice, mentorship, feedback, and sustained attention.

Taste as Intentionality

The word "taste" gets thrown around so much that it risks becoming meaningless. But taste is real and discernible. When you see work that is intentional, refined, and cultivated, you recognize the creator's point of view and their skill in expressing it. Consider Dieter Rams' work at Braun. His products weren't just functional objects. He considered placement in a room, the surrounding objects, and the tactile experience of a reach. He designed a context, not just a radio.

Having taste is not the same as universal approval. Two designers can have completely opposite sensibilities and both possess it. The commonality is the care behind the decision-making. In product design, that care becomes visible when navigating trade-offs:form versus function, expressivity versus legibility, what gets included and what gets cut. Taste lives in the details you invest in and the compromises you refuse to make.

Where Taste Comes From

Taste is rooted in a love for the discipline. Years of immersion create the sensibility required to see the difference between a misaligned element and a balanced layout. That level of awareness does not develop in isolation; critiques and collaboration are crucial.

There is a second component: empathy for the audience. In Crisan's sound engineering days, a master was only done after the mix was tested across a range of speaker types. In design, the equivalent is reviewing a product across screen sizes, color profiles, and interface languages. It means refining transitions that feel too slow or reworking empty states that few users will ever see.

When hiring for taste, Crisan looks for three traits:

  • Discernment: The ability to articulate what is not working and why, with nuanced language that reveals a deeper way of seeing.
  • Empathy: A thinker who considers the person on the other side of the screen, often making interface decisions that answer questions others haven't thought to ask.
  • Creative energy: A compulsive relationship with the craft, marked by side projects and an inability to stop working on a problem.

Ultimately, taste is a form of care: for the user, for the craft, and for the end result. It is a continuous process of refining choices until a product feels inevitable.

AI Expands the Palette

A common concern is that AI removes the struggle that produces skill. That fear assumes you accept the first output as final. An expert will not. Sir James Dyson famously went through 5,127 prototypes to land on his iconic vacuum design.

Tools have always served the creator's intent. A high-end recording console yields a different mix than a consumer setup. A robust design system gives you the resolution to render an idea. In every case, the vision comes from the human first; the tool lets them go further and explore broader. A capable designer can use a full stack of creative tools — including AI — to push ideas in directions they never considered, but the taste and judgment that guide the work remain your own.

As Crisan concluded, mastery in any domain looks the same in the end: the accumulated weight of intentional choices, repeated over and over until the output could only have come from a single individual.