What a card is
A card has a type that says what it is (a research insight, an audience, an email, an ad creative), a title, a one-line summary, and content: text, a full HTML email, or media. Deliverable cards, the ones that become real marketing artifacts, add structured fields on top, so the pieces a channel needs are named fields instead of conventions buried in prose. More on those in Deliverables.
Statuses
Every card moves through one lifecycle:
draft → awaiting approval → approved → live → done → archived
Approved, live, and done are earned, not decorative. Each one claims the work was fit to leave the building, so Plainpaper checks: a card with an unfilled image placeholder can't be approved, a creative needs at least one mockup, and an ad shape needs a call-to-action and a destination URL. Drafts always save. The gate sits on the way out. How approval itself works is covered in Approvals & control.
The statuses are also how you and your agent talk. Draft means the agent is still working. The moment a card is finished from its side, it moves it to awaiting approval: that's the handoff that lights the card up for your review on the canvas. Approved, live, and done are your calls; the agent only sets them when you've said so. So the board reads as a review queue at a glance: anything wearing the awaiting-approval mark is waiting on you, and the rest isn't.
Who wrote what
Every card records its maker: you, or which agent, by name. Plainpaper takes that provenance from the connection that wrote the card rather than from anything the writer claims, so it can't be faked. On a board where a human and an AI both write, "who made this?" always has a reliable answer.
Citations
Research cards carry their sources. Open one and a Citations panel lists them with clickable links, so "according to our research" is checkable in one click. Agents are held to citing properly: sources belong in the citations, and name-dropping an outlet in the prose doesn't count. The panel only shows what was actually attached.
The one-line summary
Every card has a one-line summary, and it isn't optional. That single line is what lets your agent read a whole campaign cheaply: on a fresh session it takes in the board as a list of summaries instead of pulling every card's full content. It's also the reason resuming a weeks-old campaign takes seconds. If a card's content changes without its summary, Plainpaper marks the summary as stale for your agent so it gets fixed.
When a card happens
A card can carry a timing: the date it's meant to happen, a range it runs over, or an offset from the board's launch day ("T-14" is two weeks before). Timed cards feed the board's schedule, where the whole plan reads in chronological order. A timing is information, never a trigger: nothing sends or fires when the date arrives, and a card whose date has passed isn't thereby done.
Where a card went live
Once your agent pushes a card's work to its destination (the campaign in your email platform, the ad in the ads manager), it records a live link on the card: the real URL of the thing it became, labeled so you can read it at a glance. The board can then point at the live campaign instead of only at the draft that produced it, and a card can carry links for several platforms at once. Plainpaper checks the link shape for platforms it knows, so a made-up URL is refused rather than recorded.
The card drawer
Click a card and it opens in the drawer: a rendered preview (formatted text, a safe preview of an HTML email, or the media itself), a click-to-edit title, a proper editor for the body, the structured fields, provenance, citations, attached assets, and the card's version history.
Simultaneous editing is safe
You and your agent editing the same board at the same time is the normal case here, and it's built to be safe. Meaningful edits snapshot into version history before anything is overwritten. If you both edit the same card at once, the later writer is told the card changed underneath it and re-reads before writing, so nothing is silently overwritten. And on the canvas, a card that's being edited shows an in-use indicator, so neither of you is surprised.
Connections
Cards link with typed arrows, and the type is the meaning:
| Connection | What it means |
|---|---|
| informs | The general-purpose link: A feeds into B. |
| produces | A produced B. |
| targets | A targets B (an ad targets an audience). |
| measured_by | A result card measures A. |
| variant_of | A/B siblings. |
| precedes | An ordered sequence: Mail 1 before Mail 2. |
One rule to know: card connections stay within a single phase. A relationship between stages (Research feeds Strategy) belongs on a phase connection instead.
Show me the chain on my "Summer sale" board in Plainpaper: which research and audience cards informed the email "Mail 2: bundle reveal"? List each card and each connection between them, so I can see the full lineage.
A/B variants & crowning a winner
Variants are sibling cards linked variant_of: two subject lines, two hero images. Link a result card to them, and once the numbers are in it can crown the winner: the winning variant goes live, the loser is archived. The test, the outcome, and the decision all stay on the board, visible the next time anyone asks "which version did we ship, and why?"
Set up an A/B test on my "Summer sale" board: two subject-line variants of "Mail 2: bundle reveal", linked as variants, plus a result card to measure them. When I give you the numbers later, crown the winner.
You can make cards too
None of this is agent-only. New card opens a dialog filtered to the card types this board uses, including full deliverables, where picking a shape sets up the required fields for you. Plenty of boards end up mixed: the agent drafts most of it, you add the odd card by hand, and both kinds of card behave the same.
Related
- Deliverables: what the email, creative and result card types turn into.
- Approvals & control: the statuses a card moves through, and which ones gate execution.