A Matter of Taste: Visual Literacy and Creative Judgment for Founders + Tech Teams

Description

A half-day workshop, built for San Francisco's founder and tech community, that gives teams a practical framework for sharpening creative judgment: the same instinct that shapes product design, brand decisions, pitch decks, and the countless aesthetic calls founders make every week without ever having been taught how.

Tech leaders are constantly evaluating creative work — a designer's mockup, a competitor's rebrand, an investor deck, an office space — often relying on gut reaction alone. A Matter of Taste draws on Michelle's background as a working artist, gallery owner, and art historian (and her years collaborating with technologists through PARALLEL Design and Strategy) to give founders and teams a structured method for engaging with art and culture, replacing "I just like it" with real critical language they can apply directly to product, brand, and design decisions.

The Sessions

Session 1 | The Anatomy of Looking (45 min): Using a rotating set of artworks and design objects, Michelle leads a guided close-looking exercise drawn from formal art history training, teaching participants to break a piece down into composition, color, material, context, and intent — the same analytical lens that applies to evaluating a product interface or brand system.

Session 2 | Gallery Walk & Reaction Mapping (60 min): In a curated mini-exhibition setting, drawing on Michelle's experience running a working San Francisco gallery, small groups move through a series of pieces and map their reactions onto a shared framework. The session surfaces how personal background and context shape taste, and builds a common vocabulary for navigating creative disagreement — a direct parallel to founder/co-founder dynamics around product and brand decisions.

Session 3 | From Opinion to Argument (45 min): A facilitated discussion where participants practice defending and refining aesthetic judgments with evidence instead of instinct, a skill that translates directly to evaluating design work, marketing creative, and product decisions back at the company.

Session 4 | Applied Taste (45 min): Teams apply the framework to something real and relevant: a competitor's brand, an internal product screen, or a pitch deck, producing a short collaborative critique using the language built throughout the day.

Benefits

Attendees Walk Away With:

• A practical, repeatable framework for evaluating product, brand, and creative work
• A shared critical vocabulary that speeds up internal design reviews and reduces founder-versus-founder friction over taste calls
• Greater confidence navigating San Francisco's art and culture scene — useful for investor dinners, gallery openings, and client relationships, not just the studio
• Stronger team cohesion built through shared discovery, not generic icebreakers
• Direct, in-person exposure to original artwork curated by a practicing local artist and gallerist