How to develop design taste when you're not a designer

One of our coaching members on Friday’s call asked if additional brand assets, like ebooks and other materials, should follow the same design style guide as the website. He also said he’s not that good at design, and he wanted a good perspective on what good design is.

The admission to the club is gone

Before AI, as we know it today, producing good visual and branding assets as part of your offering was a club. If you didn’t go to school for it, study it, and put in all the hours, you would not have the privilege of joining.

Same with developing products and apps and websites. You had to go to school, or train, or take the courses and put the hours into coding and planning out websites. There was an admission for entry that you needed to go through.

That is not at all the case anymore.

Does that mean everyone is a skilled brand designer now? No. Anyone who comes with that pre-existing admission has a massive advantage. I went to school for programming and design, so I have that advantage over so many other people who have access to the same tools as me.

Does that mean you’re not allowed to try or get good? No. You have taste. You can learn taste, you can practice taste. You can read books, take courses, practice, and come to calls like ours and ask, “How do I get good, and make sure the site I’m developing with Claude Code or an agent looks good and doesn’t seem like AI slop?”

Your job is the creative director

There are steps I learned that you can learn now too, and you can have your agent work with you on them. Brand books, style guides, direction, looking at examples. Learning the terminology of a funnel. Learning the components of a website.

You don’t need to know how to make them. You don’t need to understand all the inner workings. That’s the agent’s job now. But if you can direct it, and know the words, and know what’s a good direction to take and what’s worth exploring, you become the director.

And there are bad directors and there are exceptional directors. So your job now is becoming an excellent creative director. That’s a skill you can learn through practice.

Practice by talking through what you see

Look at good brands. Study good examples. What are some nice websites, brand experiences, good funnels? Is this appealing? Is it objectively a good brand? Just look and ask, “What’s great about this?” Learn from other experts, books and videos.

Then work with an agent to practice that taste.

What I would do is turn on a dictation tool and talk to an assistant agent, or even just a notepad. Say you’re looking at my website. You’d say something like, “I’m looking at Brad’s site. He redesigned it. I don’t have a lot of experience with design, I don’t know what I don’t know, but I’m going to talk through what I like from my perspective.”

Then just talk. “He’s got this section that’s really appealing because it looks like cards on an Instagram story that swipe left and right. There’s a cool effect, and something about the text looks really appealing.” Or, “He made this choice that feels noisy. There’s too much happening, he’s got these lines and it kind of messes with my head. I don’t know if that’s a good thing or a bad thing.”

You might say, “Man, I really hate your site. It seems messy.” Then ask your agent to ask you more questions so you can drill into it. “What feels messy about that site? Is it this, or this?” And you’d say, “Too many colors, and I don’t know what the main thing is.” Or, “The text is too big. It feels like he’s trying to show off animations when he doesn’t need to.”

Have the agent give it a name

After that, have it hand you back an assessment. Tell it to act as an expert creative director and help you understand what words you should be using. Ask it, “Are there labels and categories for this? What are those interactions, those patterns, those elements? Help me learn to better explain my experience.”

It’ll come back and say something like, “What you’re explaining about Brad’s site is typography consistency, or color hierarchy.” Or, “That’s information architecture. Here’s what it is. You said this phrase, here’s what you were trying to say, and here’s how you’d explain it.”

So when you’re developing a site yourself, there’s something for your checklist: clear information architecture. If there’s a lot of information and it’s organized poorly, it’ll be hard to understand, and people won’t know why they’re having trouble finding what they’re looking for. With good information architecture and hierarchy, you can direct the user to what they’re looking for. Same with good color choices, with good contrast, that are accessible.

I went to two years of school for all these things, and then did 10 years of putting the hours in. You can learn them with an AI agent that has access to all that knowledge and can teach you how to explain them.

Then quiz yourself

Once you understand information architecture and typesetting and color palettes a little better, ask, “What should I learn next? What book should I read, or what video should I watch, to develop my taste when it comes to layout, typesetting, color palettes, hierarchy, user experience?”

It might say, read this article, practice this, try to build something, and ask me for three variations so you can test yourself on which makes more sense.

And heck, you can build a quiz. Tell your AI, “Here’s what I don’t know. Here’s how I’m explaining it. Help me learn this and develop a quiz for me. Show me options, I’ll choose, I’ll explain what I think the answer is. Help me get better at developing taste.”

Develop your own custom quiz based on your own weaknesses to strengthen yourself. It’s the coolest thing. It’s insane that we can do this.

You can go read three textbooks and do two years of college. Or you can start with, “Here are my weak points. Let’s build a custom interactive experience to help me get better at design taste, so I can produce better quality work, know what to prompt my agents, know what to look for, and know what to say to clients. Because right now I don’t. I just know when something looks good and when something looks bad.”

This came out of a Build with Brad call.