re: “if good design boils down to personal taste preferences”

What I took from it is that good design boils down to good personal taste preferences. I think I mean taste has value too; and that good taste is a real thing, and it is something that is developed. So, personal taste is subjective, but good taste is not subjective.

Good design is hard…Whatever job people do, they naturally want to do better. Football players like to win games. CEOs like to increase earnings. It’s a matter of pride, and a real pleasure, to get better at your job. But if your job is to design things, and there is no such thing as beauty, then there is no way to get better at your job. If taste is just personal preference, then everyone’s is already perfect: you like whatever you like, and that’s it.

Iow, so if good design boils down to personal taste preferences, it means there’s no way to get better at what you do. How depressing. Put in this context, we realize it isn’t true so how do you get better? Again, Paul Graham says you must copy; specifically, other than to copy what you like, you must:

Be careful to copy what makes them good, rather than their flaws. It’s easy to be drawn into imitating flaws, because they’re easier to see, and of course easier to copy too. For example, most painters in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries used brownish colors. They were imitating the great painters of the Renaissance, whose paintings by that time were brown with dirt. Those paintings have since been cleaned, revealing brilliant colors; their imitators are of course still brown.

And I really enjoyed the Paul Graham essay you linked to. That fellow has it right.

Ryan, I find it interesting that you say fit is less important with a quiet suit – it seems to me when fabric is loud the seams and fit are less noticeable, but then you are the more experienced voice here. I like how you compare sartorial choices to language, I think that is a pretty apt analogy.

With a suit, everything breaks down to the fit. The louder the suit, the better the fit has to be. If it’s a grey pinstripe, then the fit – while still important — is less important than with a noisy suit.

There’s a direct but limited relationship between how well a suit fits and how assholeish a suit is allowed to be. A complete asshole suit demands a perfect fit.

I’ve loved and rejected many great asshole suits because the sleeves were a bit short and I’ve bought a lot of otherwise bad suits because the fit was right.

It’s all fit.

I also wanted to de-emphasize quality and fit as part of “feel” – they are there but the overcomplicate the essence of what I mean. For instance, AA doesn’t have fabulous quality – but their colours and fabrics are just right.