I thought taste was innate. Measuring a few hundred websites convinced me it is mostly vocabulary.
I used to believe taste was something you either had or you didn't — a gift a few people were born with and the rest of us admired from a distance. Building Norrly changed my mind. After measuring a few hundred of the sites I most admired, I no longer think taste is mysterious. I think it is mostly vocabulary, and vocabulary can be learned.
Two people can look at the same beautiful page. One says "I love it" and moves on. The other says "the confidence comes from a 90px light headline with negative tracking, one warm accent used only on the CTA, and a warmed off-white background instead of pure white." The second person is not more gifted. They can just name what they are seeing — and what you can name, you can reproduce. That naming is the whole skill.
Every time I measured a site, a vague feeling became a specific fact. "Premium" became a set of off-white neutrals and slow easing. "Confident" became scale over weight. "Considered" became consistent radii and a single accent. The measuring did not kill the magic; it decoded it. And once decoded, it was mine to use — and, it turned out, mine to share.
This is also why I am optimistic about AI design tools rather than threatened by them. They are extraordinary at execution and hopeless at intent. They produce the average because most people hand them adjectives. Give them a measured, nameable specification instead and they become the fastest way to realize taste that has ever existed. The bottleneck was never the model. It was the vocabulary of the person prompting it.
So Norrly is not, underneath, a gallery. It is a vocabulary machine. Every breakdown takes a site you admire and hands you the named, measured decisions behind it, so the next time you build something — by hand or with an AI tool — you start with words for what you want instead of a feeling you cannot cash in. The data report is the same idea at the scale of the whole web.
Taste, it turns out, is learnable. It is just a matter of learning to name things — and then having the discipline to choose them on purpose. That is what I am trying to make a little easier, one measured site at a time.