I've always been the person who notices things. Walk into a restaurant and I clock the typeface on the menu before I read what is on it. Pass a shopfront and I register the kerning on the signage. Sit in a meeting and I'm looking at how someone has laid out their slides - the grid, the palette, the hierarchy of information - before I process a single word of the content. I can't help it. My brain is wired to observe. It has been this way since I was a teenager, flipping through The Face and i-D and Dazed, studying the layouts and the photography and the way a spread could make you feel something before you had read a word.
For twenty years, this was enough. Observation was my skill. Seeing what others missed was my entire professional value. In strategy, the ability to spot a cultural shift before it becomes obvious, to notice a detail that reveals a deeper truth about an audience, to read a room or a brand or a market and say "here's what's actually happening" - that's the whole job. I was paid to watch, to notice, to interpret. And I was good at it.
But at some point, watching stopped being enough. Not because the skill became less valuable, but because the act of only watching started to feel incomplete. Like being a film critic who has never picked up a camera. Like being a food writer who has never cooked. The observation was real, but it was safe. It carried no risk. And that safety - that distance between me and the thing I was observing - started to feel like a kind of hiding.
The safety of watching
There's a particular comfort in being an observer. You get to have opinions about everything without ever exposing your own taste to scrutiny. You can walk through a gallery and say "this works, this doesn't, this is derivative, this is the real thing" and nobody can challenge you because you've not put anything on the wall yourself. Your taste exists in the abstract - a reputation built on reactions rather than creations.
I think about Magma, the bookshop that used to be in Covent Garden before it closed. I spent hours in there across years, picking up art books and design magazines and independent publications, developing my eye, refining my sense of what mattered. I could tell you why one cover was brilliant and another was trying too hard. I could explain the difference between considered simplicity and lazy minimalism. I had the vocabulary, the references, the aesthetic framework. But I had never made a single thing that would have earned a place on those shelves.
That gap between understanding quality and producing quality is one of the most uncomfortable things I've ever had to reckon with. Because for a long time, I genuinely believed that understanding was enough. That having taste was the same as having talent. That seeing clearly was the same as making something worth seeing.
It isn't. It's really, really not.
What changes when you start making
The first thing that changes is the terror. When you're an observer, your taste is private. It lives in your head, in your conversations, in the knowing nod you give when you encounter something excellent. The moment you start making, your taste becomes public. Every colour choice, every font pairing, every layout decision is a declaration: "This is what I think good looks like." And people can disagree. People can look at the thing you made - the thing that represents the distillation of twenty years of watching and noticing and collecting - and say "no."
That vulnerability is something I wasn't prepared for. I thought the hard part would be the technical challenges - learning to build, figuring out how to make things work. And yes, that was difficult. But the real challenge was emotional. Putting my taste on display. Saying, in public, with my name on it: this is what I value. These are the colours I choose. This is the typography I believe in. This is the level of craft I can achieve. Here it is. Look at it. Judge it.
When I built Taste OS - literally a product about understanding and scoring taste - I was essentially asking the world to evaluate my taste while I asked them to evaluate theirs. The irony wasn't lost on me. Every design decision I made on that project was a statement about what I believed taste actually was. If the product looked bad, the whole premise collapsed. How can you build a taste-scoring system if your own taste isn't evident in the product itself?
That pressure - the pressure of the thing needing to embody the thinking - is something observers never face. Critics never have to cook. Strategists never have to ship. But builders do. And the moment you cross from one side to the other, you understand that the gap between them is wider than you imagined.
The observer's advantage
But here's the thing I didn't expect. The years of watching weren't wasted. They were training. Every typeface I studied, every layout I admired, every piece of design I mentally filed away - all of it became material when I started making. I didn't start from zero. I started from twenty years of accumulated visual intelligence that I had never had reason to deploy.
When I built Trove, I knew exactly what I wanted it to feel like before I made a single decision. I wanted it to feel like a personal library in a well-designed home - warm, considered, quietly confident. I wanted the typography to feel like a good book jacket. I wanted the interactions to feel intuitive in the way that a well-organised bookshelf is intuitive. These weren't vague aspirations. They were specific references drawn from decades of paying attention. The observation had given me a library of references that most builders don't have.
I think this is the observer's unfair advantage. A developer who learns design starts from first principles - colour theory, grid systems, typography basics. An observer who learns to build starts from instinct - thousands of examples already absorbed, a sense of what works and what doesn't that's felt rather than calculated. The observer doesn't need to study good design. The observer has been studying it their entire life without realising it.
The observer who needs to be observed
There's an irony in this transition that I'm still working through. I spent twenty years being the person who watches. Now I need to be the person who is watched. The observer needs to be observed. And that inversion is deeply uncomfortable for someone whose entire identity was built on being in the background, noticing things from the edges.
That was me for two decades. The person at the edge of the room, seeing everything, saying little, comfortable in the periphery. Building products forced me out of the periphery and into the centre. I'm now the person whose work is on display. The person who needs attention, engagement, feedback. The person who - and I hate admitting this - needs people to look.
That need for visibility sits uncomfortably with someone who spent their career being invisible by design. Strategy is a backstage role. You make the work better, but your name isn't on it. You shape the thinking, but someone else presents it. You're the person behind the person. And there's a strange safety in that arrangement - you get the satisfaction of influence without the exposure of authorship.
Building removed that safety entirely. My name is on everything now. My taste is visible. My judgement is public. And the observer who spent twenty years watching from the edges now has to stand in the middle of the room and say: "I made this. Please look."
Making as a form of seeing
What I have learned, nine months into building, is that making is actually a higher form of observing. When you build something, you don't stop noticing things - you notice more. You see the gap between what you intended and what you achieved. You see the subtle differences between good spacing and great spacing. You see the places where your own taste falls short of the references you've spent years collecting. Making sharpens the eye in a way that pure observation never could, because making has stakes. Your observations are no longer abstract assessments. They're decisions with consequences.
I still notice fonts on menus. I still clock kerning on shopfronts. I still study how other people lay out their slides. But now, when I notice these things, I think about how I would do it differently. Not theoretically, not as a strategy recommendation, but practically - what would I actually build? That shift, from "I notice this" to "I would make this," is small in description but enormous in practice. It means the observation has a purpose beyond itself. It means the watching feeds the making, which feeds better watching, which feeds better making.
I'm still an observer. I'll always be an observer. But I'm an observer who builds now. And the combination - the accumulated library of twenty years of watching, deployed through the urgent, vulnerable, exposed act of making - turns out to be something I didn't have a name for until recently. I think the name is taste. And I think taste, when it finally gets expressed rather than just held privately, is the most interesting thing a person can put into the world.
