Role: Designer + Builder
Years: 2026
Team: Q Manning

IcedCoffee

At first, all I wanted was to more easily update keywords in my resume as I submitted for jobs. A month later, IcedCoffee is totally free, beautiful, robust job hunting app: update resumes, track applications, practice interviews & so much more.

Oh, the name? Well, that's a fun story too...

Idea

Everything started simply. I needed a tool for myself: my resume, editable in place, so I could swap keywords for each job. I called it CV Maker. A day later it was a Mac app, so your own AI could work on it directly.

Q's Procreate sketch of the first-run screen: a dark card reading One box to rule them all, IcedCoffee Editor, Make it simple. Get it done., a Start setup button, and the amber cup icon beside it — Fig. 1: An early sketch of the first-run screen, in Procreate.

CV Maker wasn't inspiring, so it became Itera, Latin for "do it again." Then the internet started arguing about iced coffee.

A recruiter said bringing an iced coffee to a job interview looks too casual. It went viral, and Forbes covered the debate. I was building for exactly those job seekers, so on September 22, Itera became IcedCoffee.

Bring your iced coffee. We'll handle the resume.

Fig. 2: Three names in five days.

Cup

It started as a flat cup glyph. My brief: "a yellow piece of slightly aged milky acrylic, a little scratched up, with the glyph for iced coffee inside the object, in bronze." It grew into a family: blueprint for the beta, then ice, oak and caramel.

Fig. 3: The icon, from first tries to final.

Experience

I storyboarded the site in Procreate: ice spins in, coffee pours, the lid drops, the camera pushes into the laptop, and the drink drains as you scroll.

The first cut was generated video. Pretty, but you could only watch it. So I rebuilt it in live three.js, with liquid you can wiggle the mouse through. "The 3d site IS THE SITE."

The same six panels as stills from the finished film: the ice hovering over the cup, the pour, the full cup, the lid and straw, the push into the laptop with the IcedCoffee app on its screen, and the drained cup — Fig. 4: The storyboard, and the film it became. Drag to compare.

Q's hand-drawn storyboard in six panels: ice cubes spinning above an empty cup beside a laptop, coffee pouring, the full cup, the lid and straw dropping on, the camera pushing into the laptop screen marked App screens, and the drained cup beside a Get it for free call to action, with camera moves in blue and type in red — Fig. 4: The storyboard, and the film it became. Drag to compare.

The full-motion film behind the Experience site: three ice cubes drop into an empty cup beside a laptop, coffee pours, the lid and straw drop on, the camera pushes past to the laptop, the drink drains, and a hand lifts the cup, wipes the table and sets it back — Fig. 5: FMV render as fallback for interactive ThreeJS site.

Website

Three versions in three weeks: a landing page, a film-led scroll site, then the live 3D film with the app inside. The best moment is Dive Inside: the window rises onto the laptop, and you're in the app.

Three browser windows side by side on near-black: the first landing page, the inside page and the live IcedCoffee site — Fig. 6: The first landing page, the inside page, and the live site.

2 Flavors

IcedCoffee's website comes in two flavors: Full-Flavor and Decaf. One, a fully interactive three.js project, showcasing lighting, interactivity, movement & effects. The other, a more traditional landing page focused on the features of the product.

Full-Flavor takes you through both, while Decaf gets straight to the point.

The two flavors side by side: on the left, Full-Flavor, the interactive 3D film at icedcoffee.work/experience; on the right, Decaf, the app's landing page at icedcoffee.work/app, scrolling through Practice, Import, Tailor, Match and the rest — Fig. 7: Full-Flavor and Decaf.

BYORobot

IcedCoffee has no AI of its own. Instead of asking for API keys, it connects in one click to the one you already use: Claude, ChatGPT or Codex, over MCP. No robot? A free one runs on your Mac.

In the app they're robots, because "it's never our AI." And it's built for people a little scared of AI, with a gentle New to AI path.

The new IcedCoffee Dashboard in Midnight: Good morning Mara, the pipeline strip, then Your numbers, where 25 applications stand in a donut, a 24 percent response rate, time to tailor falling to 42 minutes, and days to first reply on a timeline, 9 days typical, then a scroll through practice and interviews coming up — Fig. 8: The Dashboard.

ATS Swap

Tailoring changes your words, never your titles, employers or dates. It asks where you really used a skill before writing it in.

New words, same facts.

The keyword question stack in Espresso light (Latte): a card asks whether the Northwind Labs ad's keywords, like User research and Accessibility, are you; each answer sends the card away and the next one comes forward from the fan behind it — Fig. 9: Your words and the ad's, paired once, swapped every time.

Personalize

Nine palettes, one set of parts. A new look is new colors, not a redesign.

The nine palette cards from Settings, Espresso, Stoic, Midnight, Slate, Forest, Sage, Rosewood, Orchid and Cream, a dark blob sweeping in from the top left turns them dark, then a light one from the bottom right turns them light again — Fig. 10: Nine palettes, each tuned for dark and light.

Six groups of app parts, each in a different palette (Espresso, Espresso light, Midnight, Slate, Forest, Orchid): buttons, keyword rows found, near and missing, the question card, application cards with status pills, the Booth record button with its timer, and a toast with sidebar items — Fig. 11: The parts, in six of the nine looks.

Apply to Hired

A job search is more than a resume: a Dashboard for the week, a tracker from saved to hired, and a work search log that exports the form Texas unemployment asks for.

And the Booth, which I use before every interview: your robot asks, you answer out loud, and it tells you what to sharpen.

The real app: an offer for Design Systems Lead is set to Accepted, and the full Hired screen plays, You're joining Cobalt Meridian, You're a rockstar, ten applications to get here, before settling on You took the job — Fig. 12: Hired.

The real Booth in Orchid: the interviewer asks Mara to talk about herself, the mic is pressed, the timer runs while her answer appears as text, and it stops ready for the next question — Fig. 13: The Booth.

Release

Thirteen days to the first release candidate, twenty-four to public beta. It installs itself, updates itself and runs about 4,400 tests every release.

And it's free. "Free is free."