Your Taste, in Writing

The Taste Profile on NALA reads what you actually respond to, and it might be the most useful document in your collecting life.

There's a question that stops almost everyone in the art world, and it isn't a hard one on paper: what do you like? Ask it of a first-time buyer and you'll get a pause, a laugh, and "I know it when I see it." Ask it of a seasoned collector and you'll often get a confident answer that their walls politely contradict. Taste is the thing we all have and almost none of us can describe, and an enormous amount of the art world's machinery, the advisor's questionnaire, the designer's mood board, the gallerist's twenty minutes of small talk, exists to work around exactly that.

The Taste Profile on the NALA app takes a different route. Instead of asking you to describe your taste, it watches you use it.

How it works

Every time you swipe, like, and save on NALA, you're voting, and the Taste Profile is the running tally. Open it and you'll find how NALA sees your taste written out in plain language, alongside the evidence: your style preferences broken into percentages, your preferred mediums ranked, the moods your choices keep returning to, the subjects you gravitate toward, and, our favourite part, your colour palette, the actual hues that recur across everything you've responded to, down to the hex codes. It updates as you keep exploring, so it isn't a quiz you took once. It's a portrait that keeps getting more accurate.

And when the reading misses something, you can talk back. The Refine tab lets you describe what you love in your own words and upload visual references, art, interiors, photography, anything that captures what you respond to, and the matchmaking folds it in.

If you're new to collecting

The hardest part of starting isn't money, it's vocabulary, the sense that everyone else knows the words and you don't. The Taste Profile removes that entry fee. You don't have to know that what you love is called figurative expressionism or that your palette leans muted earth. You just swipe honestly, and the app hands you the language: here are your styles, your moods, your colours, named. It's the difference between walking into the art world empty-handed and walking in with notes.

If you've been collecting for years

For experienced collectors, the value flips: it's less about learning your taste than seeing it audited. A profile built from hundreds of unguarded swipes will show you the patterns you've stopped noticing, the medium you always circle, the mood you claim to have outgrown but keep saving, and sometimes a gap between what you buy and what you actually respond to. That gap is information. It's also a record: as your eye evolves, the profile evolves with it, which makes it a strange and lovely document, a timeline of your own looking.

The designer meeting, without the guesswork

Here's where it gets practical. Working with an interior designer usually begins with taste extraction: the questionnaire, the Pinterest board, the "pull some images you like." Designers do this because they must, most clients can't articulate what they want, and the stakes of guessing wrong are real. One Houzz survey found 16% of couples had considered separating during a home renovation, with colour disagreements the single biggest flashpoint.

Now imagine starting that relationship differently. Your Taste Profile exports, one tap on Share my taste profile, and lands with your designer as an actual document: your styles in percentages, your palette in hex codes, your moods and subjects named. No performing your taste in a meeting, no hoping the mood board translated. And it settles the two-people-one-wall problem too: a couple's two profiles, side by side, show exactly where the overlap lives, which is where the art conversation should start anyway.

For designers, this cuts the other way as well. If you're sourcing for a client who has a NALA account, ask to see their Taste Profile, it's a client brief that wrote itself, honestly, over months. And through the Interior Designer Dashboard, designers can source directly from NALA's artists with that profile in hand, which turns "I think they'll love it" into something much closer to knowing.

For artists: the commission brief you never get

Commissions run on the same missing information. A commissioner says "something in blues, calm, for the bedroom," and the artist fills the enormous silence after that sentence with guesswork. If your commissioner is on NALA and requesting a piece through an Artist Shoutout, ask if they'll share their Taste Profile. Suddenly you're working with their actual palette, their moods, the mediums they respond to, a brief made of evidence instead of adjectives. It doesn't replace the conversation. It makes the conversation start three steps ahead.

Start the portrait

Building yours takes nothing but honesty and a thumb. Swipe on what you love, refine it in your own words when you want to, and let the profile assemble itself. Then share it with whoever needs to know you better: your designer, your gallerist, your spouse, the artist making something just for you.

You've always had taste. Now there's a version of it you can hand to someone.

Discover more on NALA, and find your Taste Profile in the app.