Skill Doesn’t Matter If You Lack Taste • Hacker News Board

Re: Skill Doesn’t Matter If You Lack Taste

#41

Post by vectorpush » Tue, Apr 17, 2012, 2:26 AM UTC

meric wrote: post #37

vectorpush wrote: post #29

Taste is subjective and fleeting. The once lauded tastes of the 90s are now regarded as oh so dreadfully pedestrian by enlightened contemporary minds. The crux of taste is rooted in celebrity worship and group think. Taste is a roll of the die and a hope that your vision resonates with those around you. It's no coincidence that every great artist is eventually regarded as jumping the shark; their tastes evolve or rem…

Steve Jobs had taste, I doubt he was subject to groupthink, though.

Steve Jobs had a vision and the skills to manifest that vision into a real product that could be mass produced and sold for a profit. He may have had taste, but that's nothing special, every celebrity has taste as far as their legions of fans are concerned.

I'm not entirely convinced that taste is really all that relevant when considering the success of iOS. Apple engineered a very tiny computer that completely eclipsed all other phones on the market in terms of feature set (large touch screen, gps, edge, wifi, IM, e-mail, mp3 player, visual voicemail, motion controls, modern browser, integration with iTunes ecosystem etc). Details like icon spacing, bezel width, and font kerning really didn't matter at the end of the day.

Finally, if Steve Jobs had any taste, it certainly wasn't appreciated by the masses who pay extra to obscure the iPhone's design with a phone case that favors their personal taste.

Re: Skill Doesn’t Matter If You Lack Taste

#42

Post by known » Tue, Apr 17, 2012, 11:58 AM UTC

Skill is secondary to utility

Re: Skill Doesn’t Matter If You Lack Taste

#43

Post by neilk » Tue, Apr 17, 2012, 3:13 PM UTC

drzaiusapelord wrote: post #15

psylence519 wrote: post #2

"If you watch the newer Star Wars movies pay attention to the transitions near the end. When they are switching between each of the battle scenes they use Powerpoint style transitions. Dissolve, blinds, swipe. It’s an amateur effect in a movie that is otherwise very technically difficult and visually impressive. The skill is there, but taste is lacking." I'm sure the use of dissolves and wipes in the newer Star Wars…

To add to this, those wipes are very deliberate homages to the Flash Gordan serials and other films from that era that George Lucas watched as reruns when he was a child. Those exact wipes were in the originals too. Its just a fun little thing they put in the movies to give this quick-paced serial feel to them and to pay homage to 30s sci-fi no one really cares about. I'm so sick of this Lucas bashing. He is incredib…

Some people argue that the real reason the latter movies all sucked was that Marcia Lucas, his partner, creative collaborator, and film editor, left him. George might have had a thousand goofy ideas, but by some accounts Marcia had all the taste.

Chrome is flagging this link as malware, but I assume it was some bot infection they've cleared up. I don't see anything bad happening when I view the page load in a debugger.

http://secrethistoryofstarwars.com/marcialucas.html

Re: Skill Doesn’t Matter If You Lack Taste

#44

Post by Mansyn » Tue, Apr 17, 2012, 6:09 PM UTC

I love how the comments just shit all over the author, but I guess that's true of every article on the web. It was just funny seeing how many were correcting him about the Star Wars reference, it was like a 20 comic-book guys getting sand in their vaginas.