Boards & the canvas

The board overview

Open the app and you land on the board overview: every campaign in your workspace, as a grid of boards or a compact list, sorted the way you left it. Board labels ("Q3", "Always-on", a client name) group and filter the gallery. They organize whole boards and leave the cards inside untouched.

When a campaign wraps, archive its board. It leaves the gallery for a quiet Archive shelf at the foot of the page. Nothing is deleted: the board still opens, and your agent can still read it. Restore it anytime from the shelf's row menu. The shelf only appears once something is archived.

Creating a board

New board offers two starts: a blank canvas, or the template browser. The browser is worth a look even if you plan to start blank. Each template shows a pannable preview of the actual board you'll get, phase columns and starter cards included, so you can see what you're picking. What a template really teaches your agent is covered in Templates.

The canvas

The canvas is where the campaign takes shape, and you move through it like a map: zoom, pan, a minimap for orientation, fit-to-screen to bring the whole campaign into view. The spatial layout is the point. A campaign drawn as a graph is legible in a way a folder of documents never is: you can see that an email traces back to an audience, which traces back to an insight from research.

Phases

A phase is a movable region on the canvas, one stage of the campaign. The ecommerce template ships six: Research → Audience → Strategy → Create → Launch → Measure. They're yours to shape: rename them, resize them, drag them where they make sense. Each phase carries an icon, and can take an accent color when one stage deserves to stand out.

Your agent works with phases too: it can add a phase and arrange them on the canvas. Two edits are reserved for you by design, deleting a phase and reordering phases. Both restructure the campaign, and that stays a human call.

Two edit modes

A board has two edit modes, and exactly one kind of thing responds at a time:

Cards mode

Cards select, move, and link. Phase regions sit still.

Connections & layout mode

Phases move, resize, and connect, and you can draw arrows. Cards sit still.

That's what keeps a dense board calm: dragging a card near a phase edge always does one predictable thing.

Focus view

When one stage needs your attention, switch to focus view: the chosen phase stays bright, everything around it dims, and a navigator strip along the bottom steps you from phase to phase. It's how you review Create card by card without losing the campaign around it.

Cards belong to phases

Drop a card inside a phase region and it belongs to that phase; membership follows placement. Cards stay freely movable either way. Your agent sets the same membership explicitly when it files its own work into the right stage.

Auto-arrange

After a long agent session, a board can get messy. Auto-arrange is one click: phases snap into a clean row, and every card slots into reading order inside its phase. It's a full reset of the layout, so it sits behind a confirm. One thing it leaves alone: cards that don't belong to any phase stay exactly where you put them.

Phase connections

Phases connect with typed arrows: precedes (Create precedes Launch), informs, and feeds (Research feeds Strategy). Draw them in Connections & layout mode. These arrows are the campaign flow your agent reasons over when it decides what to work on next.

Embedded boards

A phase can embed another board. The classic use: one shared brand-research board, embedded into every campaign board that needs it, so campaigns stop re-deriving the same research. Your agent reads the embedded board's contents as part of reading the host board, with no extra step. Setting or changing an embed is a human decision by design, and embedding goes one level deep.

Board summary & guidance

Every board carries two pieces of text your agent reads before anything else on a fresh session. The summary says what this campaign is and where it stands; the guidance holds standing instructions for how to work on this board, usually pinned from the template. The summary is a shared responsibility: you and your agent keep it current. A well-kept summary is what makes picking up a weeks-old campaign take seconds.

Tidy my "Summer sale" board in Plainpaper: auto-arrange it so the layout is clean, then update the board summary in three sentences covering what this campaign is, what's finished, and what should happen next.

Housekeeping

The small stuff lives where you'd expect. Right-click a card, a phase, or an arrow for its context menu: open, comment, edit, delete. The board rail on the left holds the rest: the two edit modes, add (new card or new phase), auto-arrange, board activity, board settings, share, and comments, with a badge that counts the ones still open.