Taste / Creativity / Design / Judgement
I distrust the idea that taste alone can solve a problem. “I like this” is information, but it is not automatically reasoning. A personal preference can be useful evidence about the person making the decision, but it does not automatically tell us what the audience needs, what the communication is trying to change, or why one direction deserves to exist more than another.
At the same time, I do not want every creative decision reduced to a spreadsheet simply because the explanation looks more rigorous that way.
Strategy and taste do different jobs. Strategy helps decide what the work needs to accomplish, which constraints matter, what can be removed, and which problem deserves attention first. Taste enters somewhere else. It notices when an answer feels too obvious, too stiff, too polished, too sentimental, too safe, or somehow alive in a way another option is not.
The difficult part is that taste is not always able to explain itself immediately. Some judgement comes from accumulated exposure. You have seen enough type, images, rooms, films, interfaces, objects, campaigns, books, and bad decisions to feel that something is wrong before you can name exactly why. That does not make the feeling useless. It also does not make it automatically correct.
This is where I think the interesting tension begins. How much should creative judgement need to explain itself before we trust it?
Too little explanation and taste can become authority disguised as instinct. Too much explanation and we risk pretending every aesthetic decision can be reverse-engineered into a rational formula after the fact.
Neither one becomes more intelligent by pretending to be the other. The work I enjoy most usually has both: a reason for being the way it is, and enough sensitivity to make that reason worth looking at.
I do not think taste should replace strategy. I also do not want strategy to produce work so defensible that nobody feels anything when they see it.