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Guilherme Rovai

Amulet

A private place on your phone for the small things you used to keep in your wallet.

Personal project · Design and code

People used to carry small, symbolic things in their wallets: a photo, a saint’s card, a folded letter. As the wallet went digital, that space quietly disappeared. Amulet brings it back. You photograph a keepsake, the phone lifts it off its background, and it becomes an amulet you can place, turn and keep on a dark canvas.

Amulet is a personal project. I designed and built it as an exploratory MVP for iOS; Marcelo Canovas adapted it for Android, and it is now on Google Play (opens in a new tab). Capture is the most emotional moment, so it plays as a small ceremony: a scan sweeps the photo and the object emerges, clean. Each amulet keeps a note and the day it was received, gains a seal for every year you’ve had it, and tints its screen with its own colour. Everything stays on the phone; there is no backend.

The Amulet wordmark and the line "Carry with you what matters" on black, ringed by keepsakes: a hamsa with an evil-eye bead, a Daruma charm, a Chinese coin amulet, a Japanese omamori, a clover medal, a figa, an old portrait and a folded love letter.
A photo of a silver Daruma charm on a grey backdrop with a bright scan line sweeping across it, beside the same charm cut out cleanly onto black.
Two phones showing the Daruma's detail screen: its title, the date it was received and a note on what the kanji 福 means; and, scrolled down, the rest of the note above a grid of eleven numbered anniversary seals.
An iPhone home screen holding Amulet's widgets in three sizes, black tiles of keepsakes — a medium one with five in a row, a large one with eight and a small one with three — beside the Amulet app icon.

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