On taste, judgment and the art of the second trip.
My dad had a phrase for whenever I tried to carry too much at once.
He called it the lazy man’s load.
The idea was simple. The lazy man doesn’t want to make two trips, so he piles everything into his arms at once.
Then he drops something.
Breaks something.
Struggles through the door.
Or makes the second trip anyway.
What looked like efficiency was impatience. What looked like a shortcut made more work.
My dad was a teacher, but he grew up with very little. His own father died when he was young, so responsibility came early. I don’t think sayings like that came from books. Life taught them to him. And for whatever reason, that one stayed with me.
I think about it all the time now. The older I get, and the more I make, the more I see how creativity carries its own lazy man’s load.
Trying to solve everything at once.
Trying to use every idea.
Trying to satisfy every opinion.
Trying to make every version.
Trying to take every shortcut.
Trying to carry the whole thing in one trip.
Eventually, something gets dropped.
When I was young, there was always something standing between the idea and the finished thing.
I made fanzines with my dad’s laptop, desktop publishing software and the photocopier at a local pet store. My brother, our friends and I made films with whatever we had.
I learned guitar, piano, bass and drums. Then I got a four-track recorder and started making my own music. I made physical art. Digital art. Went to art school.
I never thought of these as separate disciplines. They were different ways of making.
But making took effort.
You had to find the equipment.
Learn the equipment.
Break the equipment.
Work out why it broke.
Find somebody who knew something you didn’t.
Make mistakes.
Try again.
And somewhere inside all that friction, something else was happening. You were developing judgment. Learning what good looked like. What good sounded like. What good felt like.
I realized early that taste is a skill, and I have spent my whole life refining it. Taste isn’t a mystical gift handed to people with superior opinions. It’s accumulated experience.
Looking. Listening. Making. Comparing.
Being wrong. Changing your mind.
Seeing thousands of things,
and slowly understanding why twenty of them matter.
Over time, you find people whose judgment you trust. Friends. Peers. Collaborators. People who can look at what you’ve made and say almost nothing, and if they hesitate, you know there is something worth looking at again.
That kind of judgment is valuable. Right now, I think it is becoming more valuable than ever.
Creative technology has been removing friction for decades.
Digital cameras removed the limits of film.
Non-linear editing removed the razor blade.
Desktop publishing removed the printing press.
Streaming removed the record store.
Social media removed the publisher.
Smartphones put a camera, an edit suite, a recording studio and a distribution network in almost every pocket. Then generative AI arrived and accelerated the whole thing again.
Now we can make an image in seconds. Write fifty headlines before lunch. Generate music. Build worlds. Change the location, the language, the actor. Change the light, the direction, our minds.
Again. Again. Again.
The machines don’t get tired. They don’t complain at revision 39. They keep making. Forever. And that is extraordinary.
But unlimited capability has a strange consequence. When anybody can make almost anything, making something is no longer the impressive part.
Knowing whether it is any good becomes the impressive part.
Give ten people the same camera and you do not get ten great photographers. Give ten people a guitar and you do not get ten great musicians. Give ten people the same design software and you do not get ten great designers.
The tool was never the talent. We knew that instinctively for decades.
A camera lets you photograph something.
It does not tell you where to stand.
A guitar gives you the notes.
It does not tell you which ones not to play.
Software gives you thousands of typefaces.
It does not tell you why one of them is right.
AI gives us an extraordinary new range of possibilities. But possibility and judgment are not the same thing. The more possibilities we have, the more judgment matters.
We gut renovated the RIOT studios. The company we hired was technically very capable, and the work itself was good. But they made decisions that drove me insane.
The electrical outlets were installed at slightly different heights.
Things I had assumed were obvious weren’t obvious at all. I remember thinking: surely nobody needs to be told that every outlet on the same wall should line up.
Apparently they do.
That project taught me something I carry into almost everything we do: assume nobody knows the thing you haven’t said out loud.
Not because people are stupid. Not because you should be an asshole. Not because the person doing the work lacks skill. They are looking at the problem through the lens of their own responsibility.
The electrician sees an outlet.
The builder sees a wall.
The fabricator sees a component.
Somebody still needs to see the room.
That is what creative direction is.
An editor sees a cut.
A designer sees a typeface.
A colorist sees an image.
A copywriter sees a line.
A producer sees a schedule.
A client sees the change they asked for.
Somebody has to understand what each decision does to everything around it. Technical ability without judgment can make something perfectly executed and completely wrong.
That might be the biggest misunderstanding about creativity. People think taste means knowing which chair looks cool. It’s much bigger than that. Taste is seeing the whole thing.
At RIOT, we make V1 as though it could be the final.
That doesn’t mean the first thing we make is sacred. It means we never make a weak first version just to start the process. We make something we believe works. Something we could put into the world that day.
Sometimes that happens. Often it doesn’t. Then come the revisions.
Revisions can improve work. A great note can unlock an idea. A collaborator can see what you missed. A client can bring context that changes everything.
But there is another kind of revision, and everyone in the creative business knows it.
The work starts strong.
Then somebody changes one thing.
Then another person has an opinion.
Then somebody wants to hedge.
Then another stakeholder needs their concern represented.
Something becomes safer.
Something gets explained.
Something gets removed.
Something gets added back in.
The interesting edge disappears. Five rounds later, everybody is looking at something technically competent that nobody loves.
Revision is supposed to refine an idea. Too often, it negotiates it.
Every revision should make the work more itself. The danger begins when revisions make it more acceptable to everyone. Collaboration can make work better. It can also average it into oblivion.
Knowing the difference is judgment.
I understand this more clearly now than I did twenty years ago.
The more capable I’ve become, the more I see that great work depends less on what you can add than on what you are willing to remove.
A great edit is the shots that aren’t there.
A great piece of music is the space between the sounds.
Great typography comes from restraint.
Great architecture relies on proportion.
Great branding dies trying to say twelve things at once.
Early in your career, capability feels additive. Another technique. Another piece of software. Another instrument. Another camera. Another thing you can do.
Then the challenge reverses. You can do almost anything. Now the question is: what should you not do?
That is a much harder skill.
There’s another part of this that seems to contradict everything else. Sometimes the best thing you make wasn’t supposed to happen.
Around 2009, while I was producing one of the Bleed Electric EPs, we were trying to make something happen one way and accidentally made something completely different.
It was better.
We started calling those moments Accidental Genius. Eventually there was a Bleed Electric song called Accidental Genius. The phrase has stayed with me ever since.
Bleed Electric
Accidental Genius
I’m always looking for those moments.
Something goes wrong.
A piece of equipment behaves strangely.
An edit lands differently than expected.
An actor does something nobody planned.
A texture appears.
A sound bleeds into another sound.
And the dreaded one: the whole project corrupts.
Or the hard drive simply stops working.
And the technically incorrect thing becomes the most interesting thing in the room.
That doesn’t contradict intention. It proves why judgment matters. Anyone can have an accident. The skill is recognizing when the accident is better than the plan.
In a world that can generate infinite possibilities, that skill is everything. Infinite generation produces infinite accidents. That doesn’t produce genius. Somebody still has to recognize it.
People love quoting the idea of 10,000 hours. When I think of true craftspeople, I think of somebody who has done the 10,000 hours ten times over.
Not literally. The point is that they never stopped. They kept making. Kept looking. Kept getting better.
And eventually something happens. They start noticing what other people don’t.
A couple of frames in an edit.
A tiny shift in kerning.
The way the light falls across a face.
A subtle shift in a grade.
The negative space around a logo.
The height of the electrical outlets.
Most people never consciously see those things. But they feel the result.
Craft is not only the ability to make something beautifully. It is the accumulated ability to notice what matters before anyone else knows there is something to notice.
There is a lot of talk right now about imperfection becoming valuable again. I think that’s true. But we should be careful about what we mean.
I love the imperfections that come from the thing itself.
The texture of the medium you chose to shoot on.
An actor giving you something real.
Film behaving like film.
A musician’s fingers moving across strings.
A genuine mistake that becomes part of the work.
The small inconsistencies that prove somebody was there.
What interests me much less is manufactured imperfection. Making something pristine and then beating it up because the moodboard says Y2K. Adding scratches because authenticity is trending. Faking the consequences of a process you chose to avoid.
Sometimes that works. But there is a difference.
Authenticity isn’t a filter. Imperfection is interesting when it tells you how the work came into the world. Otherwise it becomes just another form of perfection.
A perfectly manufactured mistake.
Some objects and ideas have earned something close to universal respect among people who care about design. An Eames chair. Helvetica. Certain records. Certain films. Certain buildings.
You can prefer something else. But these things have a resolution that is hard to dismiss. The proportions work. The thinking works. The execution works. Time has tested them.
Recognizing an Eames chair as good design is easy now. History has done the work for us.
The more interesting taste is recognizing the future Eames chair before everybody agrees.
The band nobody knows yet.
The artist about to matter.
The photographer whose language is about to be copied everywhere.
The director doing something that feels wrong at first.
The design that looks strange today and inevitable in five years.
That is where taste becomes more than preference. It becomes the ability to see and hear the signal through the noise.
Rick Rubin built an extraordinary career largely on this. Not because he could run every piece of studio equipment better than everybody else. Because he knew what mattered. He could hear the thing inside the thing.
That is a powerful skill. It grows more powerful as the world grows louder.
AI isn’t the enemy of creativity. RIOT uses technology constantly. Cameras are technology. Editing is technology. Synthesizers, motion control, Photoshop. All technology. AI is technology.
Rejecting a tool because it is new has never interested me. The better question is: what are you doing with it that somebody else wouldn’t?
The danger isn’t that machines will suddenly become creative and make everybody else redundant. The danger is that people will use incredible tools to make increasingly average things.
Same references. Same prompts. Same trend reports. Same optimization. Same performance data. Same aesthetic conclusions. Same beautifully rendered nothing.
The algorithm tells us what people already like. The model knows what already exists. The trend report describes what is already happening.
All useful. None of it guarantees an original decision.
Culture moves because somebody chooses something before there is enough evidence to justify the choice.
The first person has no case study.
Images are abundant. Music is abundant. Words, designs, content, versions. All abundant.
Options are fucking everywhere.
So the value moves.
From making more, to choosing better.
From possibility, to judgment.
From can we make this?
To is this worth making?
And finally: is this the one?
That is why I think taste matters more now than at almost any other point in my career. When almost anyone can make almost anything, the difference is knowing what good is.
For years, creative ambition has been measured in addition. More content. More platforms. More deliverables. More versions. More effects. More engagement. More options.
More. More. More.
Technology is solving the problem of more. Want ten versions? Here are a hundred. Want a hundred? Here are ten thousand.
At that point, abundance stops being impressive. Editing becomes impressive. Selection becomes impressive. Restraint becomes impressive.
No becomes impressive.
No, that version is weaker.
No, we don’t need another option.
No, the logo doesn’t need to be larger.
No, another message makes the first one weaker.
No, we shouldn’t fix that mistake.
No, the actor’s imperfect take feels more real.
No, don’t fill the silence.
No, we have enough.
There is enormous creative power in a well-informed no.
Every great piece of work is surrounded by hundreds of decisions its makers chose not to make. You don’t see them. But they are part of the work.
Technology will keep getting faster. More powerful. More accessible. What feels miraculous today will feel ordinary tomorrow. It always does.
And when everybody has extraordinary tools, the tool stops being extraordinary. What matters is the person holding it.
Their references. Their curiosity.
Their experiences. Their obsessions.
Their craft. Their ability to notice.
Their willingness to make the uncomfortable decision.
To remove something they spent hours making.
To recognize Accidental Genius when it walks into the room.
Their taste. Their judgment. Their point of view.
My dad called it the lazy man’s load. Carry too much because you don’t want to make the second trip, and sooner or later you pay for the shortcut.
Creativity isn’t much different. Just because we can make everything doesn’t mean everything needs making. Just because we can carry everything doesn’t mean we should.
Sometimes the extra trip is part of the work.
Sometimes the friction is where the idea lives.
Sometimes the thing you remove is the thing that makes everything else visible.
Sometimes the shortcut really is the long way around.
The machine can give us infinite answers. Our job is still knowing which questions are worth asking.
And when everyone can make anything, choosing what not to make becomes the art.
Chris “MUG5” Maguire Founder and Executive Creative Director, RIOT
