How Taste Becomes a Point of View
On developing your own taste and sense of creative style
For years, the prevailing advice for anyone building a creative career online has been to choose a niche. Decide what you want to be known for, identify the audience most likely to care, and keep producing work around that subject until people associate you with it. The logic is understandable. A clear category makes a person easier to describe, and what is easy to describe is often easier to market.
Creative people do not always experience their interests as separate. Subjects that appear unrelated from the outside may be connected by the same curiosity, sensibility, or way of understanding the world. The connection does not always live in the subject itself. Sometimes, it lives in the person observing it. Some of the most recognizable creative work is not defined by a single subject, but by the sensibility that carries across everything a person creates. We recognize a creator's work by what they notice, what they leave out, the connections they make, and the meaning they find in details others might overlook. The subject or medium may change, but their perspective is still the same.
In my case, storytelling is how I make sense of what I notice, but it does not limit what I want to explore. I keep coming back to the ways identity becomes visible through what we create and how we live. That might lead me to write about why creative work can present well and still feel unclear to its audience, what the objects in our homes reveal about us, or what it means to return to school as an adult. The subjects may change, but I am still asking the same question: How does our understanding of ourselves shape what we create and the lives we build? That question gives my work a through line, but breadth alone is not a point of view. Having many interests can make a body of work feel expansive, but without understanding what connects them, it can also feel scattered. The answer is not always to narrow those interests. Sometimes, it is to pay closer attention to why we keep returning to them.
Understanding those connections begins with taste, which is often treated as something mysterious or instinctive. Someone is said to have good taste when their choices feel refined, surprising, or unusually cohesive, but taste involves more than recognizing beautiful things or collecting expensive references. In my opinion, taste is the practice of selection. It takes shape through what catches our attention, what feels meaningful, what belongs together, and what deserves to be left out.
Developing taste requires a closer relationship with our own intuition. Trends can introduce us to something we genuinely love, but they can also make our preferences harder to recognize. When the same interiors, typefaces, phrases, clothing, colors, and references appear everywhere, familiarity can begin to feel like preference. We may mistake what we have seen most often for what we actually like, even though familiarity is not the same as preference.
The clearest evidence of our taste often appears in what we return to. It shows up in the images we save without knowing why, the books we never stop recommending, the scenes from films we remember years later, the objects we carry from one home to another, and the subjects that continue finding their way into our work. Developing taste means noticing those patterns before trying to define or package them.
Developing taste also requires us to look beyond what an algorithm has already decided we might like. It is difficult to develop a distinct creative style when everyone is drawing inspiration from the same feed. Books from unfamiliar disciplines, old films, museums, family photographs, music, architecture, ordinary neighborhoods, and conversations all give us material not already arranged around our existing preferences. Exposure expands what we can respond to, while attention helps us understand why something stays with us.
Taste becomes clearer through what we create, not only through what we admire. A reference can help us recognize what appeals to us in someone else's work, but making something of our own requires us to decide how we will interpret that influence. Most people begin by borrowing a visual language, rhythm, format, or approach because it gives shape to an instinct they cannot yet articulate. There is nothing wrong with being influenced by other people's work. The problem comes when we stay so close to the reference that our own judgment never has room to emerge.
Style begins to take shape when we stop trying to recreate what we admire and start deciding what genuinely belongs in our own work. We keep what aligns with our creative instincts, change what doesn’t, and allow our perspective to shape the result. That is when influence becomes interpretation.
Self-trust is inseparable from taste. Developing a recognizable creative style requires us to make choices before anyone else tells us they work. That may mean keeping an unusual detail because it carries meaning, resisting an aesthetic that performs well but feels empty, or following an idea before its place within the larger body of work becomes clear. When every decision depends on proof that an audience already wants it, the work may remain consistent without ever feeling like our own.
Once a perspective becomes recognizable, the work has room to evolve. Subjects and mediums may change as our lives shift and our interests deepen, but the creator's way of seeing keeps the work connected. An essay, a podcast, a book, or a creative project can take different forms without feeling disconnected from the larger body of work. Taste becomes a point of view when our choices begin to reveal not only what we like, but how we see.
Reconsidering Living Dvnly forced me to apply this idea to my own work. For a long time, I believed clarity meant deciding which version mattered most: the brand practice, the writing, the storytelling, or something more expansive. Every answer seemed to compete with the others because I was still looking for coherence in a category.
Living Dvnly became clearer once I recognized it as a creative world held together by a perspective. Across brand strategy, essays, books, and other creative projects, I keep returning to identity, meaning, beauty, storytelling, and the ways people build lives that reflect what they have come to understand about themselves. The form may change, but the perspective remains recognizable.
A broad body of work still needs structure. Readers need to understand how the pieces connect, and every project needs a clear reason to exist. Categories can organize the work without defining its limits.
Taste becomes a point of view when curiosity and judgment begin working together. The goal is not to make every choice look the same, but to make choices that reveal the same mind at work. People may discover your work through a particular subject, but they continue returning because they trust your taste and point of view.