Ballio Chan is a creative director, designer, and artist. Raised in Hong Kong, based in California. He runs Makeshft, a brand and design studio, sells prints and apparel, and is building TheKnow, a taste engine for food and drink. His work spans identities for startups in food, beauty, finance, and technology, campaigns for ESPN, Nike, Disney, and Paramount, concert graphics for Eminem, and led brand and creative for Automattic and WordPress.com.
An ongoing study of taste as a system.
TheKnow, a taste engine
A taste engine for food and drink.
TheKnow is a restaurant discovery platform. It matches people to restaurants through individual taste profiles, not crowd ratings.
Matching runs on Pearson correlation with confidence weighting, time decay, and shrinkage for low-overlap pairs. Each person carries a Taste Experience Score that updates as they rate. People with aligned palates surface as taste allies. Profiles print as trading cards — standard, silver, gold, holographic — that level up with exploration. A hexagonal taste graph maps the palate.