Rolls

Back in 2022, while I was at a concert recording videos directly to Instagram, I kept wishing there was a way to capture those moments and share them exclusively with my close friends. Instagram had features like “Close Friends” and “Highlights,” but I felt it could be more interesting by taking that entire flow into an entirely new thing, which led to me exploring Rolls.

Role

Product design

Art direction

Introduction

Rolls is a social album with your close friends, it takes away the concept of followers and instead focuses on close friends and friend circles.

Creating a roll

The app is opened straight into the camera view which makes starting a roll super easy. a Roll is made up of clips and it can hold up to 100 clips. An inspiration was trying to mirror how Cassette works.

Friends groups

One of the core idea behind Rolls is that beyond wanting to share memories with close friends, people also have different close friend circles that are not intersecting each other, which led to thinking about friend groups.

The “Rolls”

Rolls are viewed in a story like format (yeah very cliche) but it just felt like the right way to view these clips.

Using the idea of a cassette, I thought of recreating that feeling of a clip being torn open, similar to how a tape unrolls when playing its content. Unopened clips would be blurred, but users could navigate through different clips by holding the strip down and moving their finger across it.