People talk about taste like it is something you are born with. A lucky few have it, the rest do not. I think that is mostly an excuse.
Taste is trained. You build it the same way you build any other sense: by exposure, by attention, and by the slow accumulation of small judgments.
How it actually develops
- You see a lot of things, good and bad.
- You start to notice why one works and another does not.
- You begin to predict your own reaction before you feel it.
The third step is where it gets useful. Once you can predict it, you can direct it. You can sit down to make something and know, roughly, whether it is heading somewhere true.
The trap
The trap is mistaking familiarity for taste. The most common path is to absorb whatever is around you and call your comfort with it a preference. That is not taste. That is inertia.
Real taste often feels slightly uncomfortable at first, because it asks you to prefer the harder, quieter, less obvious thing.
If you want to sharpen it, the move is boring and reliable: look closely at work you admire, and ask what you would change. Then change something of your own. Repeat for a few years.