I have been circling this question a lot lately.
It feels like design and web work have stepped into different territory. The work isn’t just making things anymore. Some of it is teaching machines what good looks like, whether that’s intentional or not.
Because if nobody defines it, something else does. It defaults to the average, the familiar, the most common denominator, the patterns that already exist.
Everything starts to flatten out. Sites look polished but interchangeable. Interfaces feel usable but forgettable. Everything works, but nothing really lands.
So the question gets less theoretical and more urgent. What is excellence, actually? Not the aspirational version. Not the one that lives in awards or trend cycles. The real, lived version, in an online experience, a layout, a system, a piece of content.
I keep coming back to the idea that excellence isn’t one thing. It’s a few things aligning at the same time.
Clarity of intention
What is this actually trying to do? Not build an online experience or make content, but what’s the real move underneath that. Is it trying to connect. To simplify. To make someone feel seen. To shift how someone thinks.
That layer matters more than it gets credit for. It’s easy to jump straight into execution, tools, layouts, outputs, without fully naming the intention first. When that foundation isn’t clear, the work ends up floating. It might look good on the surface, but it doesn’t hold together.
When intention is clear, everything else starts to align. Decisions get easier. You know what belongs and what doesn’t. The work has direction, and you can feel it. It’s the same reason a project starts with Design Guidelines before anything gets built. Intention has to be named before it can be designed around.
Taste
This one is slippery, but unmistakable.
Taste is the ability to say no, not that, this. This feels right. This feels honest. This feels like it belongs here.
It’s not about perfection. It’s about discernment, noticing subtle differences and caring enough to choose deliberately.
AI doesn’t have that. It generates. It offers options, infinite variations, all hovering around pretty good.
So the work shifts. It’s less about making from scratch and more about choosing, editing, rejecting, sitting with options long enough to feel which one actually lands. That’s harder. It requires trust in your own instincts, even when they’re difficult to articulate.
Craft
If anything, craft matters more now, not less.
When everything is easy to produce, the details become the differentiator.
Craft shows up in the small decisions. How type sits on a page. The spacing between elements. The rhythm of a sentence. The pacing of a transition. The way something unfolds over time instead of just appearing all at once.
These things don’t scream for attention, but they shape the entire experience. You can feel when someone cared enough to refine those details, and you can feel when something was rushed or left at good enough. Craft is often invisible, but it’s what makes something feel complete.
Restraint
Excellence isn’t louder. It’s not more. It’s often the opposite.
There’s a kind of confidence in knowing when to stop, in not adding just because you can, in leaving space for something to breathe.
AI tends to give you everything, more variations, more ideas, more content, and a lot of it looks fine. Polished, even.
But excellence doesn’t feel like abundance for the sake of it. It feels considered, edited, intentional. It’s knowing what not to include. Not over explaining. Not over designing. Letting the strongest parts carry the weight instead of layering on more.
Emotional truth
This is harder to define, but it’s the thing that cuts through everything else.
Does it feel real, or does it feel assembled. Does it feel like someone meant it.
There’s a difference between something that is technically good and something that actually resonates, something that stays with you a little longer than expected.
Emotional truth isn’t about being dramatic or vulnerable for the sake of it. It’s about alignment between what something is trying to say and how it shows up. You can’t really fake that, and when it’s there, you don’t need to explain it.
Why this feels so unclear right now
There used to be external signals to lean on. Agencies, awards, trends, clients. They helped define what good looked like. There were shared reference points, things to measure against.
Those signals feel less stable now. Less consistent. Sometimes irrelevant.
That leaves the responsibility with whoever is doing the work. Which is exciting. There’s more freedom, more room to define your own standard. But it’s also disorienting, because there’s no single authority left to point to. No clear benchmark to say, this is it.
It takes a different kind of confidence, one that comes from inside the work itself, not from outside validation. That’s what twenty years of watching platforms and tools come and go teaches you, if nothing else. The external signals change constantly. The internal ones don’t.
A different way in
Lately, instead of trying to define excellence outright, I’ve been doing something simpler. I look at work I think is genuinely good, a piece of design, an online experience, and I ask what it’s trying to do, what choices made it work, and what would make it worse.
That last question is surprisingly clarifying. It forces you to identify what actually matters, what’s essential to the piece and what’s just extra. It sharpens your eye. It builds taste in a more active way than consuming things and moving on.
Where I’ve landed for now
I don’t think excellence is fixed. I think it’s something you keep tuning, through taste, through attention, through caring enough to notice the difference. Through being willing to slow down, question choices, and refine instead of rush.
That’s the whole argument behind building on Design Guidelines instead of trends. The platforms change. The fundamentals don’t. And right now, with AI making it easier than ever to produce something that looks fine, that part is on whoever’s actually doing the work.
