Work / Studio product
CarouselFlow
An iOS app that turns a rough idea into a polished Instagram carousel, with AI handling the narrative flow. Designed, branded and built by Good Trouble, end to end.
It started with an observation.
High-production carousels were everywhere. Scrolling Instagram, the trend was obvious: creators were winning with editorial, magazine-grade slide decks, and everyone else was trying to copy them. But almost none of the copies worked, and the reason was always the same. The slides looked fine individually and fell apart as a story. Slide one made a promise, slide four wandered off, and the reader never made it to the end.
The creator communities confirmed it. Across Reddit threads and creator forums, the same complaints kept surfacing: carousels taking two hours to make, templates that look like everyone else's, and no tool that helps with the part that actually matters, which is the narrative flow from first slide to last.
That gap was the brief. Not another template app, but a tool where AI structures the story first and the design follows. We treated ourselves as the client: positioning, brand, interface, icon system and a working AI feature set, shipped fast and finished properly.
A deck, mid-swipe.
Three slides fanned forward, the front card carrying a headline bar and pagination dots, the universal carousel symbol encoded straight into the glyph. The cascade points up and to the right: the direction of a swipe, the direction of progress. It reads at 29 pixels and it owns the home screen row.
Primary
Dark
Tinted
Light
120px
80px
60px
29px
Design direction
From settings-page to creative studio.
The full v2 design direction, presented the way we present to clients: an interactive spec, not a PDF. Four screens, one idea: the carousel becomes the hero everywhere. Decks instead of list rows, a stepped creation flow with a live preview strip, a dark editing stage where slides glow like artwork, and an export that feels like publishing rather than saving a file. Hover the elements. Motion is part of the spec.
AI where it earns its place.
CarouselFlow uses GPT-4o to structure a creator's rough notes into a slide-by-slide narrative arc, then renders finished slides natively with Core Graphics. The AI is not a gimmick bolted on; it is the difference between a tool and a ghostwriter.
- AI narrative flow: notes in, structured slide story out
- Native slide renderer with editorial templates
- Brand system and icon built to App Store production spec