On craft, beauty, and good taste
A personal reflection on the pursuit of craft and the meaning of beauty and good taste in design.
There’s an old tweet I once wrote: If our perception of beauty is related to familiarity, how can we create/craft/build/design beautiful things without them looking the same as everything else we find beautiful?
That’s something I go back to from time to time.
I still don’t have a concrete answer to this question (and I don’t think I ever will), but this fundamental question has been guiding my design practice, and its exploration has been crucial for my work.
To start with, a bit of context is needed: I am, above many things, a visual person. Design has been in my life formally since I was 14 (and informally before that with some random explorations in Photoshop to create banners for a Sims forum or for the many blogs I created). I studied design in high school, soon after did a foundation degree with a graphic design pathway, and ended up studying graphic design at university. I’m mentioning this not to convince you that I’m a good designer (because this, on its own, does not necessarily make me a good designer), but to mention that 1) design has been a fundamental part of my life and of who I am, and 2) my background is in visual design.
This is important to mention since the concepts of craft and beauty are inherently visual. One can argue that there’s more to craft than the visual aspect. I agree. There’s obviously much more to it. A product well crafted isn’t just a product that looks good. Its elements need to be coherent, cohesive, and the overall experience needs to feel just… right. But the first thing we notice is the visual aspect. When we first open a website or an app, even without exploring it further, the very first thing we see is the interface itself. That’s our gateway into that brand and its narrative. And in some extreme situations, it can make it or break it.
If you’ve been within the design bubble on social media recently, you’ve probably seen Jony Ive’s name multiple times in the last few weeks, for either 1) his fireside chat at Stripe Sessions, with Patrick Collison, Stripe’s CEO, and/or 2) OpenAI’s announcement to buy Jony Ive’s design startup for about $6.4 billion.
If there’s a designer that doesn’t need an introduction nowadays, it’s probably Jony Ive. For those who are not familiar with him, he is best known for his work at Apple, where he led the design of many of their most iconic products. Yes, that includes the iPhone.
I won’t be focusing too much on OpenAI’s announcement, since it would require a dedicated post. But it would be impossible to write about craft today without mentioning his interview and the effect it had on the design community. In that conversation, Jony shared a deep love for the craft of building products and experiences, sharing his idea of design practice as an expression of care. He believes that when people interact with well-designed products, they feel that someone cared about their experience. They feel that someone cared about them. That’s the importance of attention to detail. When there’s a high level of attention to detail, people might not notice each element, but they do feel that everything just works and everything feels right.
Patrick Collison, in an interview, talked a lot about Stripe’s design philosophy, placing significant emphasis on craftsmanship and beauty in product development. In his view, beauty in products signals that the creators deeply care about their work, which in turn fosters trust, because that level of attention to visual details can be an important signal that attention to the hidden details that make a product safe and usable is there as well.
At Config 2025, Karri Saarinen, co-founder and CEO of Linear, delivered a keynote titled “Crafting quality that endures”. In this talk, he emphasized the importance of prioritizing quality and craftsmanship in software development. Later, he shared a blog post titled “Why is quality so rare?”, adapted from the keynote, where he explored further the scarcity of quality in modern products, attributing it to a decline in craftsmanship and an overemphasis on speed and metrics. Linear is an obvious example when we think about craft, because they see craftsmanship as the foundation of quality. It’s a design lead company, where quality arises from deliberate attention and care in the creation process. This craft conveys a sense of rightness to a product, making it resonate with people using it even if they can’t articulate exactly why.
I asked ChatGPT to describe craft. It said: Craft is the quiet discipline behind all great work. It is the dedication to mastery, the pursuit of precision, and the respect for process.
It’s a beautiful way to put it, I have to say.
Craft is way more than beauty. Craft is also what gives beauty credibility. Craft is how something is made, and beauty is one of the forms craft can be perceived, but not the only one (although I must say it’s a very important one).
That’s why I don’t believe in the separation between form and function. I know this is very debatable and the reason for heated debates among designers, but please bear with me, even if you don’t agree. For me, it’s impossible to separate form and function, because even when you try to separate them, one inevitably affects the other. A chair must support a human body, so that dictates the fundamentals of its structure. A confusing layout can make a perfectly functional feature completely unusable. That’s the reason why I also don’t believe in “UI/UX” design. It’s design. If we need to be a bit more specific (for Linkedin reasons), it can be software design, digital product design, product design (although I know that can be confused with industrial design)… I tend to use the latter, because that’s how I see myself. I am a designer of products. I enjoy the process of building products: from early-stage exploration to the pixel-level care that goes into bringing a live version to life, with the hope that it meaningfully solves a real problem people are facing. This is a big enough topic for another post, but important to mention because craft, by its very nature, resists that separation. Craft is the integration of function and form. It’s not just about how something looks or how it works, but about how it’s made: with care, skill, and purpose.
In high school, we had to collect posters, flyers, or other graphic materials we encountered in our daily lives and found interesting. The purpose of this was 1) to make us pay attention to what was around us, 2) for us to gather references for possible future projects where we would need them, and 3) for us to develop “visual culture”. Visual culture is an interesting subject. It can mean a bunch of different things for different people, but in this context, I’m using it as a ladder that leads to what we usually call “aesthetic sensibility” and later “good taste”.
By making us pay attention and try to find “good” references, our teachers were trying to build in us the ability to look around and make judgments about what’s appropriate or compelling in a given context. They were training our sensibility. Obviously, it must be said that “good” is deeply cultural. It’s not a universal truth. What’s considered beautiful or good taste is shaped by culture, context, and familiarity.
And that familiarity leads us to the initial question: If our perception of beauty is related to familiarity, how can we create/craft/build/design beautiful things without them looking the same as everything else we find beautiful?
We are inherently drawn to what we already know, but repetition can lead to clichés (or even plagiarism). So how do we create new beautiful things without copying what already exists?
The simple answer is: I don’t know.
That’s it.
I can, however, give you some ideas of things I am trying myself:
I am actively trying to expand my design references.
I too absolutely love Linear’s website and app, and I’ve used it (too many times) as a reference for my projects. Yes, it’s great. Yes, the attention to detail is outstanding. Yes, it absolutely raised the bar. But when every website out there starts looking like a cheap version of Linear, then it’s a sign that we have a problem.
Going back to my high school reference gathering example: We were a bunch of kids around the same age, with a lot of interests in common and living in Porto. We mostly went to the same bars, exhibitions, and music shows. Our graphic references mostly came from the same places. Inevitably, most of our work felt formatted the same way. Was that a problem? Not really. The main purpose of those years was to set a solid foundation for what was to come next. We were developing our taste and training our aesthetic sensibility muscle. We were learning the ability to gather references and to distinguish what was helpful from what was not. We were learning to think and to make judgments about what we were seeing. In that sense, it was very successful.
But nowadays, it is important to seek out different design references as much as we can. I am trying to expand my design references to let other ways of doing things inform my work. I do that by following designers working in different fields, from different parts of the globe, with completely different backgrounds. I tend to resonate more with some than with others, but I feel the exposure to different ways of doing stuff is always helpful, even if we would do things differently. And I add: especially if we would do things differently.
I am trying to use familiar references consciously.
Let’s be honest here: we can’t break away from the familiar. Or at least, even if we can, it’s only on rare occasions. People like familiar things for a reason. Our perception of beauty is shaped by familiarity.
Therefore, I strive to use familiar references consciously and with meaning. I like to draw on familiar elements, but try to reframe them. Mixing various existing elements, but in a different way. Remixing instead of replicating. A bit like what Austin Kleon defends in his book Steal Like an Artist. While I’m doing it, I like to ask myself some questions: why am I using this specific element? what is the purpose of it? what am I adding to it?
I am trying to draw inspiration from other sources outside design.
There’s a quote attributed to a Portuguese doctor, Abel Salazar, which says: The doctor who only knows about medicine doesn’t even know medicine.
I truly believe that for us to be better designers, we need to allow ourselves to be inspired by everything around us and to increase that surface area from which the inspiration can come.
We can do that by reading non-design books (and I would love to add: reading fiction books as well); listening to different music; going to live shows; watching movies; going to the theatre; traveling; studying history, anthropology, and psychology; cooking new recipes; taking pictures; gardening; building things with our own hands… The list is infinite.
We should also strive to have conversations with people who are not designers. People from different backgrounds, with different expertises. Engineers, artists, doctors, activists, kids… They all frame problems differently. They all have something valuable to share. It is an interesting exercise to try to borrow their metaphors and frustrations to reframe our design challenges.
Observing nature and paying attention to what’s around us also goes a long way. If we observed more closely how nature already solves problems through form, function, and patterns, we would be in a better position to solve the problems that come our way.
I remember pretty much every day the time I asked Rafael Ferreira, one of the designers I admire the most, for advice on how to improve my skills as a designer. Among other things, he mentioned he had recently seen a picture of some leaves that had a very beautiful gradient, and he was excited to use them as inspiration for a project. That moment is so vivid in my mind, because I thought it was the representation of the exact type of designer I wanted to become: one who allowed themselves to be inspired by mundane details, one who paid attention, one who was truly excited to create beautiful things.
I am trying to think about real world metaphors to solve complex problems.
Some of the problems that we’re trying to solve now have already been solved before, just in a different way. If we understand the core function we need to design or the core challenge at hand, we can then try to look for analogous “real world” (not that digital isn’t real) situations or even metaphors in which we can anchor some design decisions.
That’s something I deeply thought about during a course at Aprender Design, Visual Design for Digital Products, led by Rafael Bessa and Marco Rodrigues. As a group, we were given a challenge and before even designing anything, we were asked to think about a metaphor to inform our design decisions moving forward. Our group had to create a mood tracker app and we decided to build on the idea of rock balancing. It’s often linked to wellness and gives a sense of balance and personal journey, making it a fitting metaphor for emotional tracking. In our concept, each rock would represent what a person was feeling on a specific day, and they would be able to choose the size of it according to the intensity of that emotion. As people log their feelings, they gradually build their own personal stack of stones, forming a unique landscape that represents their emotional path.
I thought this was a very interesting exercise. Obviously, it won’t work for every problem at hand, but by merely doing exercises like this, we’re training our diagonal thinking skills and potentially exposing ourselves to completely different solutions we wouldn’t have thought of. That’s something I’m trying to incorporate into my workflow.
I am trying to trust the process and let the product shape itself.
We need to accept that clarity doesn’t come at the start. It’s a process. We need to make and test different things, and we also need the time and space to reflect. Instead of forcing solutions too early, we should allow space for discovery (although I understand that sometimes that’s not possible due to external factors).
Christopher Alexander defended that when designing a house, we should start by deciding where the table goes, because that’s where people gather, talk, and live. It’s a way of starting with what really matters, not just drawing walls on a plan. From the position of the table, we can then think about the position of the windows, the doors, and all the other elements that compose a house.
If you start designing a product from its core function and add from there, you let the product shape itself in a way, because it evolves through the context, the constraints, and the interaction. The design is then defined by real needs.
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At the end of the day, craft, beauty, and good taste aren’t fixed destinations. They’re ongoing practices. Muscles that need to be trained in order to be improved. They’re lived, shaped, and refined through time, care, and attention. For me, the pursuit of craft isn’t about perfection, but about presence. It’s about paying attention to the choices we make, the references we bring in, the people (or the beings) we design for, and the challenges we have in hand.
Beauty, when it emerges, is a byproduct of that attention. It’s not something imposed, but a consequence of that process. And good taste is something we all need to actively cultivate by looking, listening, questioning, and staying curious.
Like Indra’s net, where each jewel reflects all the others, every decision we make resonates through the entire design, influencing and reflecting the whole. This interconnectedness highlights the need for intentionality and awareness in our craft. When we understand that every element affects the system, we move toward work that feels not only beautiful but also cohesive and meaningful. Craft, then, isn’t just about execution, but a recognition of how each part shapes and is shaped by the whole. Design is not a series of isolated tasks, but an ongoing and connected process.
So I keep going back to that same old question.
Not to find a final answer, but to keep myself honest and to keep designing with intention, care, and an open mind.