Notes · 04

Distill like
an artist.

Austin Kleon's Steal Like an Artist taught a generation of us to collect influences without shame, and it was the right lesson. Nothing is original, everything is a remix, so go steal from the best. I did. My folder of stolen designs grew for years. What the folder never did, on its own, was make me better. This note is about the second step, the one the stealing sets up.

01 · Stealing is the easy half

A collection is not a taste.

Saving is cheap. One keystroke and the screenshot is yours, and the folder grows, and growing feels like progress. But a thousand saved references make you a collector, not a designer with a point of view. The pile knows what caught your eye. It does not know why, and neither will you until you do something the save button cannot do for you.

The collection is raw material. Treating it as the finished thing is how you end up with a beautiful archive and the same taste you started with.

02 · The missing step

Taste is what survives the deciding.

Distillation is the step nobody wrote the bestseller about. You go back through what you stole and you decide: this stays, this goes, and here is the reason. The reasons are the product. Say them out loud often enough and they stop being reactions and become rules: what a color is allowed to mean, how much softness a shadow can carry, which layouts you never touch no matter how often they trend.

A wide dithered cloud of stolen references on the left narrows through a funnel into a small ordered block of kept claims on the right, labelled tastestack.md. Thin citation lines run from the block back into the cloud: every kept claim points at the reference that earned it. the library: what you stoletastestack.md: what you keptevery claim cites thereference that earned it
Stealing fills the cloud. Distilling writes the block. The lines pointing back are what make the file honest.

The cloud is everything that ever caught your eye. The block is the few claims that survived your own scrutiny. Taste is the block, not the cloud, and the only way to get the block is to do the deciding yourself.

03 · Not transferable

You cannot distill from someone else's collection.

Here is the part that matters commercially, so I will say it plainly: taste cannot be bought. You can buy someone's curation, their mood boards, their component libraries, even their opinions arranged as a style guide. What you get is their distillate. Wearing it is like wearing someone else's prescription glasses: real lenses, carefully made, ground for eyes that are not yours.

The deciding is not overhead on the way to the result. The deciding is the mechanism. A rule you did not fight for is a rule you cannot apply under pressure, because you never learned what it trades away. That is why every attempt to shortcut taste, buy the course, install the theme, adopt the guru's system, produces work that fits strangely: correct at every joint and wrong as a whole.

04 · The two files

One file for the stealing, one for the distilling.

uistash is built on exactly this split. The library is what you stole: every reference you admired, rebuilt as living code, kept without shame. The tastestack is what you distilled: the file that falls out of your keeps and kills, where every claim cites the references that earned it, and a thin library reads as a thin portrait instead of faking depth.

Kleon was right: steal like an artist. Then do the step he trusted you to figure out. Decide like one too.