Kollo
Services
UI & UX
Product Design
Social Content
Client
Independent Project
Year
2026
Context
I kept running into the same problem after every trip or get-together: everyone had great photos, but they were scattered across ten different camera rolls. Half of them never got shared, and whoever wanted to make an album afterward basically had to become the group’s full-time photo chaser.
So I built Kollo for myself first. One shared collection that quietly fills itself as everyone takes photos, without anyone having to remember to send, export or upload everything later.
Because getting the photos should be the easy part.
execution
I started Kollo the way I usually approach a design project: by mapping out the whole product before touching the final UI. I built the sitemap, worked through the main user flows and figured out how collections, profiles, invites, onboarding and navigation should connect before designing the screens themselves.
From there, I designed the app page by page in Figma, building out the visual system as I went rather than treating each screen as something separate. I wanted Kollo to feel less like a utility and more like a shared box of photos you’d actually want to keep, so the design grew around warm cream tones, deep near-black text, Polaroid-inspired cards and a custom wordmark.
Once the product structure and visual language were in place, I built the app natively in SwiftUI with Firebase on the backend. I paid a lot of attention to the interaction details too, from permission timing and Auto-Sync behavior to bottom-up panels and native zoom transitions, so the experience feels considered all the way from the sitemap to the final tap.
