Taste is a deliverable.
Most agencies sell process because process is legible. Taste is harder to invoice, but it is the thing that actually ships websites that earn their keep.
There is a version of this essay where I say taste is subjective and we all have our own and that is fine. That is not this essay.
After forty-seven websites, I am confident that taste — the thing a small team either has or does not — is the single biggest predictor of whether the site earns its keep twelve months after launch. It is also the hardest thing to sell, because the deliverable is usually invisible until you compare it side-by-side with something worse.
What we actually mean
When I say taste I mean the thousand decisions that never show up on a spec. The word choice in the secondary CTA. The exact shade of the divider that lives between the footer and the subscribe strip. The decision to cut the testimonial block entirely because it was not earning its vertical space.
Taste is the compound interest on a decade of shipping and paying attention to what shipped well.
If you have it, you do not charge for it. You charge for the work it produces. But you should know it is there, and you should hire for it the way you hire for any other craft — by looking at the work, not the deck.
The agency trap
Big agencies cannot sell taste because taste does not scale past the person who has it. So they sell process instead. Process is legible, billable, and repeatable. It is also, in most cases, theater — a way to make the client feel something is happening in weeks 1 through 4.
We have never billed a strategy phase that did not include design work. The two are the same phase. Pretending otherwise is how you end up with a 40-slide strategy deck and a homepage that reads like it was designed by a different team — because it was.