Three words have been appearing with increasing frequency in design hiring criteria, job descriptions, and conversations about what good design looks like in an AI era.

Taste. Judgement. Decisions.

Like a lot of language that circulates across the industry, they get used interchangeably, conflated, or dropped into sentences without much definition behind them. That matters because organisations are making decisions about how to build and develop design teams based on a fuzzy understanding of what these things actually are. Getting them wrong in a hiring and capability context has real consequences, not just for individual hires, but for the kind of design function you end up building.

These are also, not coincidentally, the three things design has to offer that can't be automated, offshored, or systematised away. Which is why, as AI handles more of the production layer, getting precise about them has stopped being academic and started being urgent.

Taste and judgement: two different things

They're regularly collapsed into one another. A common framing defines taste as accumulated judgement, the idea that taste is what you get when you've made enough calls over enough time, until it calculates faster, feels instinctive, reads like a reflex.

The argument is understandable, but it conflates two things that are genuinely different in kind, not just degree.

Judgement, in the psychological sense, is a cognitive capacity. The ability to evaluate a situation, weigh evidence, and reason toward a conclusion. It draws on critical thinking, pattern recognition, and experience, but it's fundamentally a reasoned act. Something that can, at least in part, be explained and examined. Crucially, it's available at any stage of a career. A junior designer can have good judgement. They might not yet be able to hold a room or navigate a complex stakeholder dynamic, but they can look at a piece of work, assess it clearly, reason through what's wrong, and think critically about a brief. That capacity grows with experience, but it doesn't require seniority to exist. When someone says "this isn't working because..." that's judgement in action.

Taste is something different. Philosophers have argued across centuries about whether it's essentially innate, closer to a sixth sense than a learned skill, or built entirely through reason and exposure. The honest answer is probably both. Some people arrive with a native aesthetic sensitivity. Others develop it through deep exposure to good work over time. And some, despite long careers, never quite get there. Experience can hone taste, but it doesn't guarantee it.

What taste adds, beyond judgement, is a position. Where judgement says "this is off", taste says "this is off, and I know what it should feel like instead." It's the capacity to make fine distinctions about what is and isn't working aesthetically, and to hold a view about what should exist. Deciding what you do and don't like, and being willing to stand behind it.

But here's what gets consistently overlooked: taste is inherently subjective in a way that judgement isn't. Philosophers call this the paradox of taste. It presents itself as a valid assessment, but it resists objective verification. Ten designers can each have fully developed, deeply considered aesthetic sensibilities and arrive at completely different positions. None of them wrong. Taste isn't a standard that some people meet and others don't. It's a point of view, and points of view legitimately differ.

This matters enormously the moment taste becomes a hiring criterion. In a portfolio assessment, the candidate isn't really being measured against a capability standard. They're being measured against the aesthetic preferences of the person doing the reviewing. A designer with a strong, considered sensibility that differs from yours doesn't necessarily have weak taste. They have different taste. That's not the same thing.

Bourdieu put it more bluntly: legitimate taste in any context is usually just the taste of whoever holds the power in the room. It's worth thinking about that the next time taste appears as a screening criterion.

There's a second problem that runs deeper. A portfolio doesn't necessarily reflect a designer's taste at all. It reflects the context they've worked in. A designer who has spent a decade inside organisations with rigorous, mature design systems may produce work of obvious visual quality, but the decisions that shaped that quality may not have sat with them. They were executing within a language that was already defined. Their eye was shaped by it, their output replicates it, but whether they could generate that standard from scratch, in a different context with different constraints, is a genuinely open question.

Working inside strong systems teaches discipline, consistency, and craft. That's real. But it means visual quality in a portfolio is a less reliable signal of independent taste than it appears. You may be assessing the maturity of the organisations they've passed through more than the sensibility they've developed themselves.

Where impact actually lives

Judgement and taste are both evaluative. They're about reading: reading what's working, what isn't, what something should be reaching toward. Different instruments, similar role. One grounded in reasoning and experience. The other in sensibility and position.

Decisions are something else entirely.

Decisions are active. The move from reading a situation to acting on it, under uncertainty, under pressure, with incomplete information and real consequences. And in design, they're where impact actually lives.

A designer can have excellent taste and sharp judgement and still produce no impact if they can't commit to a direction. The work that moves organisations forward isn't the work that was most thoroughly analysed. It's the work where someone made a clear call, what to build, what to cut, what to push back on, and stood behind it.

Design shapes what gets built and what gets abandoned. It determines how users experience a product, and by extension whether they stay. These aren't passive outcomes of a process. They're the downstream consequence of decisions made in ambiguous conditions, by people who had to call it before the picture was fully clear.

This is where senior designers earn their place. Not by having better taste than a junior (taste doesn't work that way), and not necessarily by having sharper judgement either (a talented junior can be remarkably perceptive relative to their context). But by having accumulated enough experience to make consequential calls, and the conviction to see them through.

The higher the stakes, the more complex the constraints, the more decision-making becomes the distinguishing capability. It's also the one that compounds most visibly over time. A designer who has made hundreds of real decisions, seen their consequences, and integrated what they learned is a fundamentally different asset to an organisation than one who has done technically excellent work inside a safe brief.

And yet it's the hardest capability to develop in environments that strip ownership from designers. If every decision goes up the chain, if the brief is always fully defined, if there's always someone else to defer to, the muscle doesn't form. You can have a designer years into their career who has never really decided anything, and that can be genuinely difficult to identify in a hiring process.

You can't see a decision in a portfolio. You can only find it by asking.

So how do you actually hire for them?

If taste, judgement, and decisions are three distinct capabilities that develop differently and require different conditions to surface, and portfolios mostly surface one of them at best, how do you hire for all three?

The industry largely sidesteps this. The portfolio review has become so central to design hiring that it functions as a proxy for the whole assessment. For taste, it's genuinely useful. You can learn something real about a designer's sensibility from their body of work, even knowing you're partly measuring alignment with your own aesthetic, and that the work may reflect the organisation's visual language more than the designer's independent eye.

For judgement and decisions, you have to ask. Directly. And listen carefully to what the answer reveals, not just what it says.

For judgement: push into reasoning rather than outcome. Not "what did you do?" but "how did you decide?" Not "what was the result?" but "what were you trading off, and why did you weight it that way?" Judgement shows up in the quality of the reasoning, not the polish of the conclusion. A candidate who can walk through a genuinely difficult problem, one where there was no clean answer, where something had to give, and explain clearly how they thought about it, is showing you something real. A candidate who gives you a smooth story where every decision was obviously correct is probably editing.

For taste: separate sensibility from alignment. Ask what they're drawn to and why. Ask them to describe work they find genuinely interesting, not impressive, not successful, but interesting. Ask what they dislike and whether they can articulate why. You're not looking for them to match your aesthetic. You're looking for evidence that they have one, and that they can hold it under examination. Strong taste can be questioned and explained. Weak taste collapses when pushed.

For decisions: ask behavioural rather than hypothetical questions. Hypotheticals let candidates tell you what they'd ideally do. Behaviour tells you what they actually did when it was hard. Ask about a call they made that they weren't certain about. A decision that didn't land the way they expected. Something they pushed back on and why. The quality you're assessing isn't whether the decisions were right, decisions made under uncertainty often aren't. It's whether they have a genuine relationship with consequence. Whether they've owned something, seen it play out, and integrated what they learned.

None of this makes hiring easy. It makes it slower and more demanding than reacting to what you see on screen. But if these three things are genuinely what design has to offer, and we think they are, then assessing for them requires more than a case study presentation and a culture-fit conversation.

The honest issue isn't that organisations don't want designers with taste, judgement, and strong decision-making. Most do. It's that the hiring processes they rely on weren't designed to find them, and the working environments they've built often aren't designed to develop them either.

You can't hire for decision-making capability if you've never given designers real decisions to make. You can't assess judgement through a portfolio review alone. You can't separate taste from context if you've never thought to ask.

These aren't failures of intent. They're failures of design in the most literal sense. The process hasn't been interrogated.

Building a design function that genuinely develops taste, judgement, and decision-making isn't just a hiring problem. It's a capability problem. It requires thinking about how designers are developed, what ownership they're given, and what conditions allow these things to form, not just which candidates appear to have them on paper.

The organisations that get this right won't just hire better. They'll build something that compounds.

As the production layer thins, the question the profession has been avoiding becomes harder to sidestep: is the way we hire and develop designers actually building these things? Or are we measuring the deliverable and hoping the rest came along for the ride?

At Gale & Co., how we assess candidates goes beyond what's in the portfolio. If you're hiring senior design talent and want to think more carefully about what you're actually measuring, let's talk.