I don't have a definition for good taste yet. I'm still learning it, not teaching it. But when I look at what's actually changed in my last few videos, and in Spatial Mapper's interface, the pattern is clearer than I gave myself credit for. It's not a new skill showing up. It's an old option finally getting noticed.
For a long time I recorded on my phone's back camera, cut it, added a caption and clean audio, and posted that. No color grading. I didn't even notice the flat look, because I'd never seen it next to anything else. It was just what video looked like.
A few videos back I tried color grading, almost by accident. I put the graded clip next to the ungraded one and the difference wasn't subtle. I'd been shipping the flat version for years without registering it as a choice at all. Since then I grade every video on purpose, and the most recent one is the best-looking thing I've posted.
The same pattern showed up in Spatial Mapper's UI. Every project before this one, I used the platform's default local UI kit as it came, no customization. This time I paid for a proper UI kit and built the whole interface around it, because I wanted the app to have an actual feeling, not just work correctly. Nothing forced that decision. The default kit would have shipped fine.
Same instinct, applied twice: the color grade and the Spatial Mapper UI kit.
I don't do motion graphics. But I know I can use AI coding tools to get a motion-graphics result anyway, so "I don't do that" stops being a valid reason to skip it. It's the same instinct as the grading and the UI kit, pointed at a different gap. Don't let the default answer, or the default tool's output, sit there unquestioned as the ceiling.
None of this is about skill I didn't have. In every case the easier option was sitting right in front of me the whole time. What changed wasn't ability. It was noticing that the default was a choice, and being willing to spend the extra effort not to take it. That's the part I keep coming back to. The default doesn't announce itself as a decision. It just looks like the only way to do the thing, right up until you see it next to the alternative.
Taste is the gap between what's easiest to ship and what you actually choose to ship, once you can see the difference.
The same trait shows up in client work, not just personal projects. On a recent client project I caught myself adding features and polish that weren't in the brief. It wasn't part of the contracted creative-director scope, but I added it anyway because I wanted the thing to look better, not just meet the spec. A few months back I'd have delivered the contracted minimum and stopped there, and it would have been a completely acceptable outcome. Nobody would have known the difference except me.
I don't think that's a bigger version of the color grading and the UI kit. I think it's the same instinct with a client's name on the invoice instead of my own. A wider footprint for this than I expected when I first started paying attention to it.
I still don't have a clean definition of taste. What I have is evidence: three separate places where the default was available, free, and good enough, and I paid the extra cost anyway once I could see what the default was costing me.