On Taste, Simplicity, and the Courage to Make Something Beautiful

We are told that beauty is subjective. In the eye of the beholder. That there is no right or wrong.

But is it? Because nature does not seem to think so.

Look at a shell. Look at the spiral on it. Now look at the spiral of a galaxy. They are the same shape. That is not a coincidence. What makes a face beautiful? Symmetry - one side mirrors the other. What makes a flower beautiful? The geometry, the way the petals are arranged. What makes great architecture? The way the shapes and the sizes complement each other.

These are mathematical patterns. And they keep showing up across nature, across history, across everything we find beautiful.

Beauty has structure. It is not random. And two things arrived in the same week that gave me the language for something I have felt my entire life but never quite managed to put into words.

The first was Paul Graham - the founder of Y Combinator, one of the sharpest minds in technology - resharing an essay he wrote in 2002 called Taste for Makers. I read it and sat quietly for a minute afterwards, because someone had articulated the idea that taste is not preference. It is real, it is identifiable, and it is a skill that can be developed.

The second was the Steve Jobs Archive publishing a collection called Letters to a Young Creator. Over thirty letters from the people who knew Steve, worked alongside him, were shaped by him. Released on what would have been his 71st birthday. And Jony Ive - the man who designed the iPhone, the iMac, the iPad alongside Jobs for fifteen years - wrote a letter about what it actually means to care about making something beautiful.

Together, they point at something I think is the most important conversation happening in technology right now. Not about tools. Not about speed. About what we believe the people who use our work actually deserve.

The Comfortable Lie

We are told from childhood that taste is personal, subjective, that there is no right or wrong.

It sounds generous. It sounds democratic. But it is a comfortable lie we tell each other to avoid conflict.

Graham opens his essay with a question that sounds almost naive: is there such a thing as good taste, or is taste just personal preference? And then he answers it in a way that stopped me cold. He says if taste were just preference, then everyone's taste is already perfect. There would be no way to get better at designing things. No direction to improve towards. But we all know that is not true. We know when we are looking at something genuinely beautiful versus something that has just been assembled. We feel it. We just lack the confidence to trust that feeling.

And then he goes further. He identifies the principles that keep appearing across every field - mathematics, architecture, painting, writing, engineering. Simplicity. Symmetry. Resemblance to nature. As if beauty is not subjective at all. As if there is a deeper truth to it that transcends medium and era and culture.

Steve Jobs believed it too. He famously said that Microsoft had no taste. People thought that was arrogant. But I do not think he was being cruel. He was being precise. He was saying: they do not ask whether something is good - they ask whether it works and whether it sells. Those are not the same question.

Taste is the ability to know the difference.

The Bull

For me, Picasso is the most powerful illustration of what simplicity actually means.

In 1945, he made a series of eleven lithographs called The Bull. He starts with a detailed, realistic bull - muscular, anatomically complex. The kind of drawing that makes you think: this person can really draw.

But then - over eleven iterations - he strips it. Removes muscle. Removes shadow. Removes everything that is not essential. Until at the end he has five or six lines. And those lines contain the entire essence of a bull - the power, the weight, the character - more completely than the detailed version ever could.

That process - that brutal, disciplined act of subtraction - is what decades of mastery actually earns you. Not the ability to add more. The ability to know what to take away. The confidence to take it away. And the skill to make what remains feel not sparse, but complete.

Graham makes the same observation across fields. In mathematics, a shorter proof is a better proof. In writing, say what you mean and say it briefly. In architecture, beauty depends on a few structural elements, not a profusion of decoration. Good design uses symmetry. Good design resembles nature. And good design looks easy - even though getting there is incredibly hard.

Most people think simplicity is the easy option. That minimalism is about doing less. It is the opposite. Simplicity is the hardest version of the thing - the version where there is nowhere to hide. Where every single element has to earn its place.

That is what Jobs did to the phone. That is what Ive did to every product they made together. And it is no coincidence that Ive's greatest influence was Dieter Rams - the German designer whose philosophy fits in three words: less, but better.

Protecting What Is Fragile

Ive's letter from the archive is not what you might expect. He does not talk about products. He barely mentions the iPhone or the Mac. He talks about how Steve thought. He says: "The way he thought was profoundly beautiful." He describes Jobs's curiosity as "ferocious, energetic and restless" - not limited by his knowledge, not casual or passive, but practiced with intention and rigor.

And then he writes something I keep coming back to: "Ideas are fragile. If they were resolved, they would not be ideas - they would be products. It takes determined effort not to be consumed by the problems of a new idea."

We live in a world obsessed with shipping. Validate fast. Move fast. Get feedback fast. There is wisdom in that. But there is also a kind of violence in it if applied too early.

There is a moment in the creative process where an idea is alive but not yet strong enough to survive scrutiny. It exists as a feeling, a direction, an instinct - before it has the language or form to defend itself. Expose it to criticism too soon and you kill it. Not because the criticism is wrong, but because the idea has not had time to become what it could be.

Jobs and Ive understood this. They spent their afternoons in what Ive calls "the sanctuary of the design studio." Protected space where ideas could evolve before they were tested.

I think about this in my own work building We UC. There is constant pressure to ship, to show progress, to validate early. That pressure is mostly healthy. But I have also killed ideas by letting the committee into the room before the thing had legs. The skill is knowing when something needs protecting and when it needs testing. I am still learning that.

Graham says great design is redesign. Leonardo's drawings often show five or six attempts at a single line. The Porsche 911 only emerged from the redesign of an awkward prototype. First answers are almost never the best answers.

Taste as Love for the Craft

Tim Cook's letter describes the moment he decided to join Apple. The company was struggling. Most people thought it would not survive. Then he heard Steve speak.

Cook writes that when Jobs spoke, "any trepidation I harboured instantly dissolved." Not because Steve had a perfect plan. Because he had complete clarity of purpose. Cook says he had never met someone with so much passion and vision. And he says he traded a job for a purpose the day he joined.

That distinction matters. A job is a set of tasks. A purpose is a reason. People will do extraordinary things in service of a genuine reason in a way they never will for a task list.

And I think that is what taste really is. It is not snobbery. It is love for the craft. It is caring so deeply about what you are making that you refuse to accept anything less than beautiful. Not because you want to show off. But because you believe the person on the other end deserves it. And because you want to apply your own style to it - to make it not just functional but uniquely, thoughtfully yours.

Ive understood this. He closes his letter with something I think is the most important line in all of this. He writes: "He truly believed that by making something useful, empowering and beautiful, we express our love for humanity." And then: "My sincere hope for you and for me is that we demonstrate our appreciation of our species by making something beautiful."

That is not a design philosophy. That is an ethical position. When you choose the good-enough option - the it-works-so-why-bother option - you are making a choice about how much you value the person on the other end.

Why This Matters Now

I do not think this is just a conversation about Apple or Picasso or Dieter Rams. I think it is the most urgent conversation in technology right now.

Because we are drowning in output. AI can generate volume. It can generate competence. What it cannot generate is taste - the love for the craft that makes someone obsess over getting something right. The intolerance for ugliness that comes from a person who has stared at their work long enough to hear the voice that says: there must be a better way.

That voice is the thing. Not the tools. Not the frameworks. Not the ability to produce faster and cheaper. The voice. The one that looks at something functional and says: this is not good enough.

Graham wrote his essay twenty-three years ago. Before the iPhone. Before AI could write code or generate images. Every word is more relevant today than when he wrote it. Because the cheaper it becomes to produce things, the more valuable taste becomes. When anyone can generate output, the differentiator is whether someone cared enough to make it right.

Nature's ratios. Simplicity. Symmetry. These are not trends. They are truths. Picasso's five-line bull took a lifetime to earn. Jobs spent decades obsessing over details most people would never notice. Dieter Rams designed products in the 1960s that still look contemporary because the principles underneath them are true.

The world does not need more output. It needs more people who refuse to accept that good enough is good enough. People who understand that simplicity is not the absence of effort but the highest expression of it. People whose taste comes not from judgement but from genuine love for what they are making and genuine respect for the people experiencing it.

I still get this wrong. I still ship things I know could be better. But I never stop hearing that voice. And the message I take from all of this - from Graham, from Ive, from Jobs - is: do not explain it away. Cultivate it. It is the most valuable thing you have.