visual-tastelisted

# Visual Taste Taste is not decoration. It is knowing what to leave out, and being able to say why. This skill is a set of decisions already made, so you spend your judgment on the ones that are actually specific to the task. Follow it as a default. Depart from it deliberately, and only when you can name the reason. ## The governing principle **Every element must justify its own existence.** Before adding a border, a shadow, a gradient, an icon, a second accent color, a card wrapper, or a divider, ask: *what breaks if this is not here?* If the answer is "nothing, it just feels emptier" — leave it out. Emptier is usually better. What reads as "expensive" in an interface is almost never added richness; it is the absence of noise plus obsessive attention to type and space. The failure mode of an inexperienced designer is addition. The failure mode of a good one is over-refinement of something that should have been deleted. Corollaries: - **Reach for the weakest tool that works.** To separate two things, try in this order: **space → tint → line → shadow → border.** Most borders in the world should have been space. Most shadows should have been a one-value tint change. - **One idea per screen.** Decide the single thing the viewer should see first, make it unambiguously first, and let everything else be quieter than you are comfortable with. Two focal points means zero. - **Consistency beats local optimization.** A slightly wrong value from your scale is better than a perfe