When people say taste and judgment are the differentiators in this AI era of design, nobody really tells you how to develop them. Training your design senses is rigorous work, no different from training as a boxer or musician. The foundations are harder to establish now. Giving a designer an agentic toolset without those foundations is like giving a pianist-in-training a DJ set instead of a piano.
The answer seems obvious: be highly generative and make a lot of work. But the work must be made with intention, which is where our definition of experience becomes unclear. Experience is often measured by years in the field when it should be measured by progress during those years. As a colleague once said to me, “Someone can have twenty years of experience at the same skill level.”
Whether you’re starting your design career or need a refresher, let’s get into a few areas where you can apply deliberate practice. These four areas don’t cover everything. They are the ones I focused on as I moved from art school to product design.
1) Train the eye
One of the most refreshing things you can do as a designer is step back and observe. Training the eye isn’t simply looking at a lot of things. It’s intentionally identifying, recognizing, and noticing patterns in the world.
Apple UI designer Freddy Anzures was on a flight when he observed how the physical door required a deliberate, continuous sliding action to lock and unlock, preventing accidental openings.
Slide to Unlock.
This became one of the most iconic interactions in digital design, and it could have gone unnoticed. The physical world has rules that have already trained human behavior.
To train the eye, spend time doing three things: Capture, Collect, and Curate. To Capture, bring the tools that work best for you: a physical notebook, camera, recorder, or phone. As you walk around, travel, read a book, or surf the internet, Collect what matters. The point isn’t volume but discernment. I keep folders on my Mac for interesting textures, color palettes, fonts applied in the wild, and shapes found in nature. Finally, Curate what you captured. Don’t bury it in a Photo Library with tens of thousands of images. Put your observations somewhere you can revisit daily. Print them out or make a mood board. Whatever you choose, give your trained eye the proper attention.
2) Design dexterity
A developed eye must be accompanied by precision in the hands and fluency with the material. When I taught design students, I saw a common pattern: the hands don’t match the eyes. Whether students were sketching or drawing interfaces, they could recognize what they saw but couldn’t translate it into what they made. The root cause often came down to perspective or proportion. This is where rigorous studies come in.
I describe my first year of art school as very monochromatic. We weren’t allowed to use color. My classmates and I majored in painting and arrived excited to use our fancy oil paints, only to learn that year one was all graphite and charcoal. The only subjects allowed were still lifes, figure drawing from live models, and copies of the old masters.
For interface designers, my recommendation is to copy from the masters. By copy, I don’t mean taking a screenshot and putting it in Codex or cloning from a UI library. Look at the work and reproduce it in your UI drawing tool. Put the screenshot on the canvas and reconstruct it from scratch. As you do this, note the margins, spacing, and font sizes. Ask why they work. What deliberate decisions produced this output?
Second, study how artifacts are finished. One of my first jobs was as a Production Designer. I didn’t love it at the time, but it was one of the most important roles I’ve ever had. I spent hours each day taking files from other designers and adding the fit and finish needed to export pixel-perfect artifacts.
As you develop design dexterity, you’ll learn to translate what you see into thoughtful interfaces at speed.
3) Fluency of aesthetics
It’s a bit controversial to put the philosophical study of beauty, art, and taste third. However, I firmly believe it’s important to train the eye and hand before developing fluency in aesthetics. I’ve seen designers with high taste struggle to apply it themselves: the eyes don’t match the hands. Having taste and being a practitioner is what separates the art critic from the artist. Once you’ve developed a trustworthy ability to wield the material and observe the world, go deep on aesthetics.
To increase your fluency, read essays and develop your perspective. Study Umberto Eco not to become a disciple (unless you want to), but to form a point of view on different philosophies. Widen your aperture on how the world interprets art and design. Understand how trends develop, and you’ll learn where they form and how to leapfrog them.
4) Establish rhetoric
Rhetoric is the art of persuading through language or visual media. It’s the craft of visual communication and what we as designers are trained to do.
The more you present your work, the better you’ll become at articulating the rationale behind your choices and influencing the path forward. Designers often get distracted by the mechanics of influence and decision-making. We forget our superpower: showing a compelling narrative and a visualization of what the world can be.
Rhetoric also sharpens your own judgment. If you can’t explain a decision beyond “it feels right,” your intuition may be ahead of your reasoning. Critiques, presentations, and written design rationales force you to make that reasoning visible. You learn to explain not only what works, but why it works, what you rejected, and which tradeoffs you made.
Present your work often, especially before it feels finished. The goal isn’t to win every argument. It’s to make your thinking clear enough that other people can see the future you’re trying to create and help improve it.
Intuition is developed through lived experience
Experience isn’t time spent; it’s evidence of what you can do. The proof of work comes first. Design intuition can feel mysterious because the reasoning behind it becomes difficult to see. An experienced designer may recognize that something is wrong before anyone can explain why.
Edward de Bono argued that creativity isn’t an innate talent but a deliberate skill anyone can develop. I believe this, but it requires rigorous training.
This is why the repetitions matter. Every time you notice a pattern, reconstruct an interface, study an aesthetic movement, or defend a design decision, you give your intuition more evidence to draw from. Over time, the distance between seeing, understanding, and making gets shorter. Your eye begins to match your hand, and your hand begins to keep pace with your judgment.
Taste and judgment aren’t qualities you claim. They are capacities you demonstrate through the work, over time.