Somewhere in the back of my head, there's a filing cabinet. It's enormous. Badly organised. Full of things I didn't deliberately put there but can't seem to throw away. A magazine spread from The Face circa 2001. The way the light hits the shelves in a specific bookshop in Kyoto that I visited once, for twenty minutes, seven years ago. The Levi's ad where the bloke runs through the building site. The exact shade of green that Aesop uses on their bottles. The weight of a Penguin paperback.

I didn't choose to remember any of this. I didn't sit down and catalogue it. But every time I make a creative decision - about a colour, a typeface, a layout, a tone of voice - this filing cabinet opens and something relevant falls out. Not as a conscious reference. More like a feeling. A pull toward something that "feels right" without my being able to explain why.

This is the reference library. Everyone has one. It's the accumulated residue of everything you've consumed, experienced, admired, and been disgusted by over the course of your entire life. And it is, I'd argue, the single most important thing you bring to any creative decision.

The shelves

If I tried to walk through my own library, the shelves would look something like this.

There's a print section, and it's the oldest and probably the most influential. The Face, i-D, Dazed and Confused, FHM when it still had photographers who cared, loaded when it was genuinely funny, Wallpaper* when Tyler Brule was still running it. I used to stand in WHSmith reading these covers because I couldn't always afford to buy them. The layouts, the typography, the art direction - all of it went into the library before I had any idea what art direction was.

Your taste isn't what you consciously choose. It's what decades of absorbed culture have taught your instincts to reach for.

There's an advertising section. Wieden+Kennedy in the early 2000s, when Nike advertising felt like it was the most important cultural production on earth. Crispin Porter + Bogusky when they were terrifying the industry with Burger King and Mini. Fallon London. Mother. The agencies that made the work that made me want to work in advertising in the first place. Every campaign I admired left a deposit. The bravery of it. The craft. The understanding that advertising could be culture, not just interruption.

There's a technology and product section. Monocle's editorial design - the first time I saw a news magazine that looked like it had been designed by someone who cared about beauty, not just information. Bloomberg Businessweek, which proved business publishing could feel like a luxury product. The original iPod click wheel. The satisfying bounce of iOS scrolling before they smoothed it out. Apple's packaging - the slow reveal, the precise fit, the weight of the box.

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Try this: Write down the first ten visual memories that come to mind - not photos you've taken, but designed things you've encountered. Magazine covers, packaging, buildings, interfaces, adverts. That list is a map of your reference library's most visited sections.

There's a Japan section, and it's growing. The packaging in a konbini. The signage in a train station. The way a bento box organises space. The ceramics in a ramen shop. The visual density that somehow isn't chaotic because every element has been placed with intention. Japan broke something in my Western-trained eye and rebuilt it with more capacity.

There's an interiors section. Pub interiors, specifically - the old ones, before gastropubs sanitised everything. Dark wood, patterned carpet, brass fittings, frosted glass. There's a reason these spaces feel good that has nothing to do with nostalgia and everything to do with materials and proportion and the human scale of the rooms. Also: hotel lobbies. Bookshop layouts. The way Ace Hotel used to feel before the brand became its own tribute act.

How the library works

The important thing about the reference library is that it doesn't work like Pinterest. You don't search it. You don't browse it by category. It's not a mood board you pull up when you need inspiration. It works more like peripheral vision - always there, always informing, rarely the thing you're looking directly at.

When I chose serif headlines for my portfolio, I wasn't consciously thinking about The Face. But the magazine's commitment to typographic character over typographic neutrality is in the filing cabinet, and it influenced my instinct toward a headline font with personality rather than another geometric sans-serif. When I built Modern Retro with its dense, textured visual language, I wasn't consciously channelling 1970s shopfronts. But decades of absorbed retail typography and colour palettes from that era made the aesthetic feel inevitable rather than arbitrary.

The difference between someone with taste and someone without it isn't talent. It's library size.

This is why travel matters for creative people. Why reading widely matters. Why going to the bookshop and the gallery and the restaurant and the market matters. Not because any single experience will directly translate into a design decision, but because every experience adds a volume to the library. And the bigger and more diverse the library, the richer the instincts it produces.

Curating the intake

The library isn't passive, though. Or it doesn't have to be. The best creative people I've worked with are deliberate about what they consume. Not in a joyless, strategic way - more like how a serious reader builds a bookshelf. With range, but with intention. Actively seeking out things that are outside their comfort zone. Going deep on topics that seem irrelevant to their day job. Following the thread from one reference to another to another until they end up somewhere surprising.

I do this instinctively and always have. I'm a collector. Bookmarks, links, physical books, screenshots, saved posts. My browser has more tabs open than is psychologically healthy. Trove, one of the products I built, grew directly out of this compulsion - the need to not just save things but to understand the patterns in what I save. What am I drawn to? What keeps showing up? What does the collection say about the collector?

Because that's the real insight about the reference library. It's not just a resource. It's a self-portrait. The things you've chosen to remember - or that have chosen to stay - are a map of who you are aesthetically. Your library IS your taste, externalised across a thousand unconscious bookmarks.

Building yours

If you're early in your career, the best investment you can make isn't a design course or a new tool. It's hours. Hours spent looking at things that are good. Hours in bookshops, galleries, cities you haven't been to. Hours reading about design decisions you'd never have to make. Hours down rabbit holes that feel unproductive but are actually filling shelves.

If you're further along, the investment is different. It's about challenging the library. Deliberately seeking out aesthetics that make you uncomfortable. Going to places that don't match your existing references. Reading the designers and thinkers from cultures you don't know well. The danger of a mature library is that it becomes an echo chamber - only reaching for what it already contains, only producing variations on what it already knows.

The library should never feel complete. The moment it does, your taste has stopped evolving, and taste that stops evolving is just habit wearing a nicer outfit.

So keep adding volumes. Keep going to the bookshop. Keep opening tabs. Keep standing in spaces that make you feel something and asking yourself why. The filing cabinet is never full. And every new addition makes every future decision a little richer, a little more surprising, a little more yours.