The Human Psychology Behind Taste

This is an Arcbound special, curated from a long interview I had with Eli Wright, who we like to call Head of Tastemaking at Arcbound, and a beloved creative talent.

A designer who helped define Apple spent years designing Ferrari's first electric vehicle.

When it was finally unveiled, people hated it.

Not because it was poorly designed. By almost every objective measure, it was beautiful. Refined. Thoughtful. Impeccably executed.

The problem was simpler than that.

It didn't feel like Ferrari.

When I asked Eli Wright why the car missed the mark, I expected a conversation about design systems, typography, proportions, or color.

Instead, we spent the next forty-five minutes talking about his parents, his upbringing, global inspiration, and people.

By the end of the conversation, it made perfect sense.

Because this wasn't really a conversation about design; rather, it was a conversation about how taste is formed.

Everyone talks about taste as if it's something you're born with. You either have it or you don't.

But sitting across from Eli, I realized the non-obvious taste. 

It’s not an external aesthetic, but comes from an internal autobiography. 

As Eli shares, "Your taste is the accumulated psychology of your life."

It begins long before you ever create anything.

Eli grew up in a small town in southern Maine.

His town didn't even have a traditional high school, so he attended Thornton Academy, a school that brought together students from around the world.

—--

Speaking of Maine, and Arcadia National Park, Eli’s work was recently featured in Esquire Magazine. 

—--

For the first time, "normal" wasn't one thing.

His classmates came from Norway. China. Jamaica. South America.

Most people experience different cultures through travel.
Eli experienced them sitting next to him in class by becoming observant.

He became fascinated by the subtle differences in how people saw the world, what they valued, how they expressed themselves, and what made them feel at home.

Without realizing it, he was building something much deeper than aesthetic preference.
He was building a perspective that would later follow him into his early career..

At home, two very different people were shaping him in equally profound ways.

His father is an engineer.

Eli witnessed firsthand, "If something wasn't done to his standard, he didn't complain about it. He tore it down and rebuilt it."

There was a story Eli told me about contractors installing tile in their home. It wasn't right. His father ripped the entire thing out and redid it himself.

Not because he wanted perfection, but because he believed craftsmanship mattered.

PS, Shoutout to Eli’s Father. Your son has made our up front brand design process a work of art. 

His mother is an occupational therapist.

Her patients are refugees, asylum seekers, families who have survived war, violence, and unimaginable hardship.

She taught him something entirely different.

That every person deserves to be deeply understood before they are judged.

Looking back, it's hard not to see those two influences woven into the way Eli approaches creative work today. 

From his father came standards.
From his mother came empathy and heart.

Everything else sits on top of that foundation. Which bleeds into our work today. When Eli works with clients, he’s not trying to force them into an identity he sees for them; rather, he unpacks who they are and builds around their essence. 

Long before he ever touched professional design software, he was already making things.

Editing baseball photos, or even creating simple digital games, creating and editing skits and videos with his friends.

Experimenting with whatever creative software he could find.

I’ve seen this first hand as well. He has a strong gravitational pull and gets lost in his interests, often not responding for a few hours, then coming around with a design output at 1 AM EST, telling me “Look at this. What do you think?”

Most people think creativity begins with inspiration.
Listening to Eli, I came away believing it begins with paying attention.
To people, details, and emotion.

Said simply: Attention to why something feels right, or why it doesn't.

The quality of your work is often limited by the quality of your observations.

Eventually, those observations became a career.

At Arcbound, Eli spends hours interviewing founders before he ever opens a design file.

He isn't searching for colors, but he's searching for identity.
How do our clients want people to feel? What stories do they keep returning to? What immediately feels wrong to them?

One thing he said stayed with me.

"Most of my job is watching what people reject. Anti inspiration is just as useful as inspiration, as its helpful to know which direction you DONT want to go, as oftentimes it can point you in the direction you do want to go."

Rejection reveals identity faster than approval ever will.

It's easy to say yes, but a meaningful no requires conviction.

Maybe that's what taste really is.

Not everything you've collected.
Everything you've chosen to leave behind (more on this in the Founders Podcast Episode #421 with Johnny Ive).

Speaking of “Taste”

Follow Eli on IG for more on culture, fashion, architecture, and design.

–

That brings us back to Ferrari.

The problem wasn't execution.

It was translation.

The designer brought decades of experience shaping Apple—minimalism, precision, and restraint. Those instincts made Apple iconic.

But Ferrari isn't Apple.

People don't love Ferrari because it's restrained.

They love it because it feels barely contained.

Because it has noise.

Tension.

Emotion.

The designer didn't lack talent.

He simply didn't inherit Ferrari's autobiography.

Which is what makes this moment with AI so fascinating.

Today, anyone can generate beautiful images, compelling writing, or imitate almost any style.

But AI has no autobiography. It has history.

You have a life. Your company has a story.

And that difference matters more than ever.

The irony is that so many people are asking AI to tell them who they should become.

But authenticity has never been assembled from references.

It's uncovered through reflection.

Your best work doesn't begin when you open Figma, Claude, or ChatGPT.

Your best work begins years earlier.

In the people who raised you. 

The places that changed you.
The cultures that challenged you.
The moments that shaped your standards.
The stories that taught you empathy.

Your taste isn't something you discover.

It's something your life has been quietly writing all along.

Arcbound Event on July 15

When: July 15, 10 AM PT / 1 PM EST | Where: Register Here

Experts: Todd Smith,  John Belizaire, Agnes Budzyn

Moderator: Bryan Wish

As AI moves from experimentation to enterprise-scale adoption, the next competitive advantage will not belong only to the companies with the best models or most visible applications. It will belong to the organizations that understand the infrastructure behind them.

Every AI breakthrough depends on something deeper: energy, compute, data centers, capital efficiency, and the systems required to make intelligence affordable, scalable, and reliable. While much of the conversation focuses on AI use cases, fewer leaders are asking the foundational questions: Who is powering this new era? Who is reducing the cost of compute? And what infrastructure needs to exist so new companies, products, and workflows can be built on top of this expanding intelligence layer?

Join Todd Smith, Co-Founder and CEO of TAHO Labs, John Belizaire, CEO of Soluna, and Agnes Budzyn, Investor and Board Member at Bluedge Ventures, for a timely conversation on the energy and compute infrastructure underpinning the next wave of AI innovation.

Together, they will explore how power availability, data center strategy, compute economics, and infrastructure investment are shaping the future of AI, and why the companies that understand these dynamics will be better positioned to build, scale, and compete.

Expect a candid discussion on where AI is headed, what most leaders are overlooking, and how the next generation of enduring companies may be built not only with new intelligence, but with new power.

CLICK TO REGISTER