Software engineers have a concept called technical debt. It's the accumulated cost of shortcuts - the quick fix instead of the proper solution, the hardcoded value instead of the flexible one, the "we'll refactor this later" that never gets refactored. Individually, each shortcut is barely noticeable. Collectively, they slow everything down. Eventually, the system becomes so weighed down by its own compromises that building anything new feels impossibly heavy.
I want to talk about something similar, but less discussed. Something that affects not just products and brands, but homes, wardrobes, offices, social media presences, and entire lives. I'm calling it taste debt.
What taste debt looks like
Taste debt is what accumulates every time you accept "good enough." The slightly wrong font because the right one costs money. The stock photo because finding the considered image takes too long. The default blue because choosing a colour palette requires decisions you don't have the energy for today. The IKEA shelf because the one you actually wanted was out of stock and you needed something now.
Each compromise is tiny. Invisible, almost. You barely register it in the moment. But taste debt compounds the way financial debt does - silently, steadily, and then all at once.
One day you look around your flat and it doesn't feel like yours. You open your product and it feels generic. You visit your own website and something is off but you can't quite name it. That's taste debt. It's the distance between what you settled for and what you actually wanted, multiplied by a hundred decisions you stopped paying attention to.
How it accumulates
I've watched this happen in advertising agencies more times than I can count. A brand starts with a clear visual identity - someone with taste made strong initial decisions. The colours mean something. The typography has character. The photography style is distinct. It feels like itself.
Then time passes. The original designer leaves. A new campaign needs assets quickly. Someone uses a slightly different shade of the brand colour because they eyeballed it instead of checking the guidelines. Another person picks a font weight that's close but not quite right. A social media manager uses a template that doesn't quite match the tone. A junior designer adds a drop shadow because it "looks better" to them.
None of these are catastrophic. None of them would fail a brand audit on their own. But layer them up over months and years and suddenly the brand feels muddy. Diluted. Like a photocopy of a photocopy - you can tell what it's supposed to be, but the sharpness is gone.
Products do this too. Every feature added without considering how it fits the existing design language. Every settings page that gets less attention than the homepage. Every error message written by an engineer instead of someone who cares about tone of voice. Every onboarding flow that works but doesn't delight. Taste debt, compounding silently in the corners of the experience.
Why it's harder to pay off than technical debt
Here's the uncomfortable truth: taste debt is harder to address than technical debt. With technical debt, the problem is usually legible. The code is messy, the tests are missing, the architecture has outgrown its original design. You can point at it. You can measure it. You can write tickets to fix it.
Taste debt is vaguer. It's a feeling. Something is off, but it's hard to pin down exactly what. And fixing it requires something more vulnerable than a refactoring sprint - it requires admitting that you stopped caring. That you let standards slip. That "good enough" became the standard instead of the exception.
In my experience, the people who accumulate the least taste debt are the ones who treat small decisions with disproportionate respect. The colour of a button. The spacing between elements. The specific word in a label. These aren't small decisions disguised as big ones - they ARE the decisions that, in aggregate, determine whether something feels considered or careless.
The audit
The fix for taste debt is the same as the fix for any debt: acknowledge it, stop adding to it, and start paying it down. For products and brands, that means a regular taste audit. Not a brand refresh or a redesign - something simpler and more honest. Just looking at what you've built with clear eyes and asking: does this still feel like us?
I do this with my own projects. Every few weeks I'll open one of my sites and just sit with it. Not testing functionality, not checking analytics. Just feeling it. Does the typography still feel right? Are the colours still saying what I want them to say? Is there anything I added in a rush that I wouldn't add again if I were starting fresh?
Sometimes the answer is yes, everything's fine. More often, I find something. A spacing decision I made at midnight. An image I used as a placeholder and forgot to replace. A section that's grown cluttered because I kept adding to it without editing. Small things. But small things are where taste debt lives.
The gap between good and great
People talk about the gap between good and great as if it's one big leap. A single decision that separates the ordinary from the extraordinary. That's almost never how it works. The gap between good and great is made of a hundred tiny choices. The right font weight instead of the approximately right one. The considered colour instead of the default. The image you spent twenty minutes finding instead of the first result. The word you changed three times before it felt accurate.
Taste debt is what happens when you stop making those tiny choices with care. When you start rounding down instead of rounding up. When convenience wins more often than conviction.
The good news is that it works both ways. If taste debt compounds negatively, taste investment compounds positively. Every time you make the considered choice instead of the convenient one, the quality of the whole thing ratchets up imperceptibly. Do that consistently, across hundreds of decisions, and something remarkable happens. The product starts to feel inevitable. Like every element belongs exactly where it is. Like it couldn't have been made any other way.
That feeling isn't luck. It's the accumulated return on a thousand small investments. And unlike the debt, it's a balance you never want to draw down.
