People talk about taste like it's a possession — you have it or you don't. After fifteen years of interface work, I think taste is something narrower and more learnable: the trained habit of noticing what's wrong before you can articulate why.
Taste is resolution
Show a great designer and a junior designer the same screen. Both might say something's off. The difference is resolution: the great designer sees that the type is optically misaligned with the icon, the spacing rhythm breaks at the third card, and the transition eases in when it should ease out. Same feeling, higher resolution. Taste is the number of dimensions you perceive at once.
This is why taste is learnable. Resolution comes from exposure plus attention — thousands of hours of looking at work while asking what specifically makes this good. The looking alone isn't enough; plenty of people consume great design all day and absorb nothing, because consuming isn't interrogating.
Build the reference library
Practically: keep a folder of interfaces that stopped you, and for each one, write the sentence that explains the stop. The sentence is the exercise — it converts a feeling into a dimension you can now see everywhere. My folder is eleven years old and the early entries are embarrassing, which is the point. Embarrassment at your old taste is the receipt for the new taste.
You can't buy taste, but you can compound it. The interest rate is attention.
Taste under deadline
The real test isn't recognizing quality at leisure — it's ranking flaws under pressure. Shipping means choosing which wrongness survives to production, and the taste that matters professionally is knowing the misaligned icon costs you nothing while the mushy transition costs you the demo. Perfectionism is taste without prioritization, and it ships nothing.
The uncomfortable part
Taste grows faster than skill. There's a long stretch where you can see exactly what's wrong with your own work and can't yet fix it. Most people quit in that gap. The ones who don't are the ones whose work you eventually keep in your folder.