Over the past four years, I have interviewed roughly 200 designers. The ratio that keeps showing up — across SadaPay, ZAR, and freelance advisory work — is 1 in 12. Out of every twelve candidates who make it to the portfolio review stage, one gets through. Not because the others are bad. Most of them are competent. Some are genuinely skilled. But competence and skill are table stakes. What separates the one from the eleven is taste.
Taste is a loaded word in design. People confuse it with aesthetic preference — liking minimalism over brutalism, preferring serif to sans-serif. That is not what I mean. Taste, in the context of product design, is the ability to make decisions that feel inevitable in hindsight. It is knowing when a flow has one too many steps. It is sensing when a label is doing too much work. It is the instinct to remove rather than add. You cannot teach it in a bootcamp and you cannot fake it in a case study.
Taste is the ability to make decisions that feel inevitable in hindsight. You cannot teach it in a bootcamp.
When I review portfolios, I am not looking at how polished the mockups are. I am looking at the decisions behind them. Did this person question the brief or just execute it? Did they explore alternatives that were genuinely different, or just iterate on the same idea three times with slightly different spacing? Do they have opinions about their own work — real opinions, not recycled design Twitter talking points? The candidates who stand out are the ones who can articulate why they made a choice and what they would change if they could do it again.
The other thing I look for is curiosity that extends beyond design. The best designers I have hired were interested in economics, psychology, architecture, music, film — anything that trained their eye and sharpened their judgment. A designer who only consumes design content ends up producing derivative work. The ideas have nowhere to come from except other designers' ideas. The 1 in 12 brings something from outside the discipline, and that is what makes their work feel different. Not better-executed. Different.