Good taste is a thousand small no's

People talk about taste like it's something you're born with. Maybe a little. But mostly it's a muscle, and the rep is saying no — to your own ideas, especially the ones you're proud of.

The first draft of anything is a pile of everything you thought of. The work is removing nine-tenths of it without losing the thing that made it good. That's harder than adding, because every cut is killing something you liked.

Kill the clever thing

The clever thing is the most dangerous. It's the pun, the extra animation, the third font, the joke in the headline that distracts from the offer. It feels like the part that shows you're talented. Usually it's the part standing between the audience and the point.

If you can remove it and nothing breaks, it was never load-bearing. Remove it.

Do that enough times and people start calling your work tasteful. What they're actually noticing is the absence of everything you had the discipline to cut.