Swipe into work.

“Applying for jobs is boring and tedious, and it can be done so much better.”

Applying for jobs is the same form, the same upload and the same silence, over and over. You spend an evening on an application and never find out if anyone opened it. Dating apps worked out years ago how to make browsing feel light and quick, and I wanted to see what that would look like for finding work.

The other half is LinkedIn. It was meant to connect people, but I think it's lost its way. It's become a glorified corporate meme machine: humblebrags, engagement bait and posts written for an algorithm instead of for anyone you'd actually work with. It could be so much better.

So Rolla is two things in one. A deck of jobs you swipe through, made so every application still means something, and a network that's about people and the work they make, like Instagram for your career.

Swiping is quick and it's fun, but left and right comes with a lot of baggage. A job isn't a face, and I didn't want people flicking past roles without a thought. So Rolla swipes up and down instead, and the cards roll over a wheel like a Rolodex: up and over the top to apply, down and under to save.

Passing on a job is a deliberate tap on the ✕ rather than a flick, and both saves and passes can be undone. With a keyboard, the arrow keys do the same.

Make applying too easy and you get the opposite problem: people spraying applications at everything, and employers drowning in them. Rolla's answer is simple. Apply stays locked until you've scrolled to the end of the listing.

The Apply button fills with mint as you read, and when you reach the bottom it unlocks with a little "Nice, you read the lot." Until then, the card on the deck resists being swiped up. It costs you a minute, and it means every application an employer gets is from someone who knows what the job is.

A super like for jobs. You get three a week, and each one needs a short message, a few lines on why you. A Standout skips the queue: it's pinned to the top of the employer's list with your note going straight to the person hiring.

Keeping them scarce is what makes them mean something, both to you and to the person reading them. They refill every Monday. In the brand, a Standout is always ink with a mint star, so you spot one straight away.

This is my answer to LinkedIn. The feed is work: showcase posts, milestones and studio news, with stories you swipe through like Instagram. Profiles lead with what you've made and how you work, not a list of buzzwords. Skills are vouched for by the people who've actually worked with you, instead of one-click endorsements from strangers.

I gave the connections their own words too, because "connection" stopped meaning anything a long time ago.

Rolla is named after a Rolodex, the spinning card file that sat on every desk and held everyone you knew in work. It's a network and a deck of cards at the same time, which is exactly what the app is.

The logo is a side-on Rolodex: a solid mint fan of cards on a curved ink stand, with a few loose cards flicking out. In the wordmark, the second "l" is a swiped card, tipped and in mint. I wanted it light and calm rather than dark, so it's built on off-white, ink and one confident mint.

The bits you'd only notice by using it.

Rolla is a clickable prototype, not a live service, written in plain HTML, CSS and JavaScript with no framework and no build step. On a computer it sits in a phone frame; on a phone it fills the screen. Your progress is saved in your browser, and "Reset demo" on the Profile tab starts it fresh.