Taste and vision: how your work connects

I keep coming back to two things that will only become more important: vision and taste.

If you’re reading this and thinking, ‘yes, this is exactly the problem,’ you’re probably seeing it in your own work. Most content these days is technically fine. It ticks the boxes, looks good, follows the brief, and gets delivered. No one’s slacking off, and the craft is usually solid.

But still, it doesn’t connect.

You know the feeling. You’re in a review, you scroll past a post, or you watch a video that should be doing its job, and you can’t spot anything wrong. It’s clean, competent, and gets approved. But it leaves no mark. It doesn’t make anyone feel anything, it doesn’t change a decision, and it doesn’t make someone think, ‘that’s for me.’

That’s when the real question pops up, either in your head or out loud in a meeting: What’s the point?

As tools improve, it’s easier for anyone to create things that look good. That’s not the issue. The problem is, ‘looking good’ isn’t enough to stand out anymore, especially when everyone is trying to look credible. When the bar gets higher, you start to notice what’s missing.

Most of the time, what’s missing is a clearer point and sharper judgment. In other words: vision and taste.

Vision is the point you’re protecting.

When I talk about vision, I don’t mean a fancy mission statement or a moodboard. I mean being clear about what you’re building and what you want your work to achieve.

It’s what you come back to when you’re under pressure, when stakeholders have opinions, or when you’re tempted to just ship something to keep things moving. Vision makes decisions easier because it gives you something to protect.

If we sat down together and you asked me what vision looks like in practice, I’d ask you a few questions and listen for whether your answers feel real.

What do you want to be known for? What do you want people to feel when they encounter you? What do you want to leave out, even if it’s popular, because it doesn’t belong in your world?

When those answers are clear, your work starts to add up. Not because you’re making more, but because what you’re making actually fits together. People can sense the thread.

When those answers are unclear, the work just becomes a stream of outputs. Busy, consistent, technically fine, but strangely hollow.

Taste is the judgment that gives your work weight.

Taste is what shapes the work, so it actually matters.

You see it in the edit, in the restraint, and in the willingness to cut what isn’t working. It’s being able to look at something that’s technically finished and say, ‘this still isn’t saying anything,’ without blaming the team, the brief, or the platform.

Taste also shows up in those quieter, uncomfortable moments when you realise you’re just borrowing a style instead of saying something real. It’s easy to fall into that, especially in crowded industries where copying competitors feels safe.

Most industries have a house style. You can spot it straight away because everything starts to look and sound the same. The temptation is to follow the standard, polish it up, and hope it’s enough.

The result? Work that’s acceptable, but forgettable.

Taste gives you the confidence to draw inspiration from outside your industry without it being random. It’s the difference between liking something and understanding why it works, then making it fit your world.

A real example: People Make Petrofac

Let me give you a real example, because this is where it actually matters.

At Petrofac, I led a campaign called People Make Petrofac, from concept to execution. On the surface, the idea sounds simple, maybe even familiar: our people are the story. They’re not just supporting characters. They’re the main event.

Plenty of organisations say ‘our people are our greatest asset.’ Plenty run employee features. What made this different wasn’t the sentiment. It was the direction and the references we used to guide the work.

The inspiration didn’t come from our industry. It came from watching Vanity Fair’s YouTube content and seeing what they do well. They make the person the star and treat the format with respect. The pacing is considered. The tone is confident. It has a clear point of view.

We didn’t copy Vanity Fair. We took the principle.

The principle was simple: if you want people to care about someone, you have to frame them in a way that makes them matter. You have to give them presence and let the craft do some of the talking.

So we took the core theme, people as the story, and made it work for our brand, our constraints, and our goals, while still making it feel elevated. That’s the real job. It’s not a creative trick. It’s judgment.

That campaign won awards, but the important part isn’t the trophy. It’s the chain of decisions that gave the work intent.

Vision gave us the point: make our people the stars.

Taste shaped the choices: how it looked, how it sounded, how it was edited, and what we left out.

So, how do you develop taste and vision without just copying someone else?

This is where people get stuck or start acting out. Vision turns into ‘we should sound bold,’ and taste becomes ‘we like this look,’ and the work starts drifting again.

In reality, developing both is less dramatic than it sounds. It’s about training your judgment.

Start by collecting references outside your industry. If you only look at your competitors, you’ll only ever remix what they’re doing. Look at magazines, film, product brands, sport, architecture, and hospitality.

You’re not looking for a style to copy. You’re looking for principles you can use.

Then do the part most teams skip: explain why something works. ‘It looks cool’ is a dead end. What are you actually responding to? Is it the restraint? The casting? The pacing? The confidence? The clarity of the idea? Taste gets sharper when you can name what you’re seeing.

Once you can name it, you can translate it. The question stops being ‘how do we do that?’ and becomes ‘what’s the principle here, and how would it work for us?’

You also need to get specific about the emotional target. Not in a fluffy way, but in a practical way. What do you want someone to feel at the end: reassured, energised, curious, proud, seen? If you can’t name the feeling, you’ll end up with safe work that’s just designed to get approved.

And finally, you have to make decisions earlier than feels comfortable. When the work feels harder than it should, it’s rarely because people aren’t trying. Usually, it’s because the direction isn’t clear enough, so decisions get pushed to the end, when it’s much harder to change anything. That’s when you end up refining something that was never properly directed.

A quick check you can use in reviews

If you’re looking at a campaign, a page, a film, or even a single post, these questions tend to tell the truth quickly:

• What’s the point of this, in one sentence?

• What do we want someone to feel?

• What are we saying that only we can say?

• What belongs to our world here, not just the category?

• What would we remove if we had to strip this back by 30%?

• If this went live tomorrow, would it be remembered, or would it simply be published?

If those answers are vague, the work will be too.

The bar will keep rising, and ‘technically fine’ will keep being the norm. You can stand out if you make clear decisions early, edit ruthlessly, and build work that actually makes people feel something.