Taste

Principles

The design work should show.

Restraint is good. Empty minimalism reads as “not designed.” Composition, imagery, color and headline weight must each do a job.

Clarity first.

A viewer should know what the thing is within 1–2 seconds. Style never excuses confusion.

Everything looks intentional.

Spacing, scale and placement feel controlled. Nothing should look random.

Have a point of view.

Slick template polish is acceptable but forgettable. Aim higher.

Calm.

No walls of text and no stacked chrome.

Never

• Generic, clip-art or AI-looking illustration and 3D characters.
• A lone headline in empty space with nothing designed around it.
• Art-for-art’s-sake layouts with forced image placement or odd line spacing.
• Randomly scaled decorative shapes.
• Dark “premium SaaS” templates that look AI-generated.
• Overwhelming blocks of display text.
• Multiple sidebars in dashboards.
• Helper text, taglines and secondary labels. The UI must speak for itself.
• Over-labeled demo content: “Sample Project”, “Lorem ipsum”, “$XX.XX”.

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