Taste is the new black

Translated from the original Spanish article.

Taste is the new black: it has always been there; it’s simply back in the spotlight.

Last week we launched Vistta, a web app for interior design and AI-powered architectural image processing. Overall, the feedback has been very good. And I’m truly grateful to everyone who took the time to have a look.

But what stays with me most is something several people have told me. That, within the kind of SaaS it belongs to, Vistta shows an unusual care for the interface and the art direction. That it stands out from the mass of platforms being released.

I won’t lie to you: it made me proud of Kocoro’s work. But beyond the compliment, what has kept going around in my head these days is something else: what lies behind something coming to be seen that way.

Behind it there are hours. Many of them. Of friction, of discomfort, of frustration. Of giving shape to something you glimpse but can’t always bring into being. You almost never fully do. All those hours that, in moments of doubt, you question, and that muddy the financial spreadsheet. Between frustration and bewilderment, between “the symptom and the sign.” In the eternal, unfulfilled aspiration to reach, through our creations, whatever makes us vibrate, stirs us, evokes a particular connection. A devoted commitment to a purpose that isn’t always seen and, sometimes, simply isn’t visible.

As Máximo Gavete wrote in letter 294 of Honos: “Judgment doesn’t come in through the eyes; it comes in through friction. Like one stone polishing another.”

It’s an idea that becomes more relevant now.

AI democratizes design, it also makes it easier, and that’s fine. I’ve seen good proposals that come straight out of a model. The new digital standard will be more aesthetic than the previous one, to everyone’s benefit. In the same way Inditex did us a favor by keeping us from dressing again the way we dressed in the 2000s.

But the standard will never stop being a standard. The homogeneous, the identical.

Identity, however, is found in what’s different, in the roughness of what’s one’s own, in what isn’t shared with everyone. And it doesn’t deal in absolutes. Neither pretty nor ugly. Neither good nor bad.

It’s one’s own taste. And one’s own taste is the path, sometimes a rocky one, that each of us has taken the trouble to walk.