Nº 001/The Taste Issue/$0.00 (overpriced)

A ZINE ABOUT TASTE for people who claim they don’t care

Twenty-four other sites in this collection behaved beautifully.1 Perfect kerning. Respectful scrolling. Grids you could set a table by. This is the twenty-fifth. We read the same rules they did — twice, actually — so that every single thing wrong with this page could be wrong on purpose.

§01

The Manifesto

Seven rules for breaking rules. Memorize them, then misquote them at parties.

  1. 01

    Learn the grid.

    Memorize it. Take it to dinner. Ask about its childhood. Then tilt it two degrees and watch who flinches. The ones who flinch are your people.

  2. 02

    Restraint is a skill.

    So is knowing that a 400-point headline is, occasionally, the restrained choice.2

  3. 03

    Between spreadsheet and mess.

    If everything aligns, you’ve made a spreadsheet. If nothing aligns, you’ve made a mess. Taste lives in the eight pixels between.

  4. 04

    White space is not empty.

    It’s where the reader catches their breath before you take it away again. Like this.

    See?

  5. 05

    Accidents vs. style.

    A rule broken by accident is a mistake. A rule broken on purpose, in writing, with a footnote,3 is a style.

  6. 06

    On Comic Sans.

    Comic Sans is not the problem. Reaching for it without knowing why is the problem. (It is also the problem.)

  7. 07

    Taste is not knowing what you like.

    Taste is knowing why — and being able to defend it, out loud, at 2 a.m., to someone who disagrees and is also right.

§02

Field Notes on the Other 24

This zine ships as the finale of a 25-site collection. We visited the neighbors. They were all so well-behaved it hurt.

Nº 05, 08, 10, 12, 14, 16–18, 20–22, 24 — presumably also tasteful.4 We didn’t finish the tour. There was a grid at home that wasn’t going to tilt itself.

§03

The Button

There is a button below. It is labeled clearly. The label is an instruction, and also a test of everything this zine believes about you.

Pressing it voids the warranty on this paragraph.

§04

An Interactive Definition

Good design meets the user where they are. The following noun does not.

Attempts to acquire taste: 0

Try to hover it. Go on. It’s just a word.

Every other site in this collection respects your scroll.

We respect it too.

That’s why we’re holding it hostage.

…

(comic timing requires a pause)

Okay. Released. Tell no one.

§05

An Essay on Taste, With Interruptions

The footnotes have opinions. Click them. They’ve been waiting.

Taste gets described as a possession — she has taste, he lacks it — as if it were a house key. It isn’t. Taste is a verb wearing a noun’s clothing.5 It is the accumulated residue of ten thousand small acts of paying attention: noticing that this margin breathes and that one wheezes, that this sentence lands and that one merely arrives.

Which is why “rules” exist at all. Rules are compressed attention — someone else’s ten thousand noticings, zipped into a sentence like don’t set body text in a display face.6 You follow the rule to borrow the attention. You break the rule when your own attention has grown large enough to post bail.

The amateur breaks rules they never learned, and it shows: the chaos has no spine, the collisions have no clearance, the joke has no timing. The master breaks rules the way a jazz drummer drops a beat — deliberately, audibly, and in a way that makes the beat you expected louder than any beat could actually be.7

So no, this page is not an argument against craft. It is craft, flexing. Every rotation here is a whole degree. Every overlap clears its neighbor. The button that told you not to press it was pressed — by you — and the page reassembled, because destruction without reassembly is just vandalism, and vandalism is easy.8 Reassembly is taste.