The Collaborate Console
Comics are a team sport, and the Collaborate Console is the workroom. Five deep-linkable tabs hold everything: who you are to other creators, how you find them, how you connect, and how the talking actually happens once you do.
1Colleagues, not fans
Collaborate is for the colleagues you work with. Community is for fans. That single distinction explains the whole design. It's why there's no Message button on a public profile: messaging is for people you're connected with, while fans interact by following, subscribing, and commenting in public. The console has five tabs, and every one of them is deep-linkable: Find, Connections, Messages, Projects, and Feed.
2Your profile, and the roles you carry
You appear in the collaborator directory under the roles you carry, Artist, Writer, or Critic, which is exactly how other people filter their way to you. Reader is the baseline role everybody has, and an account with no creator roles simply lands on Browse when it signs in. So the roles on your account are not decoration: they are your findability.
3Find people, then connect
The Find tab searches the collaborator directory: filter by Artist, Writer, or Critic, or search by name. Every result carries a Message button, and a Connect button where that applies. The Connections tab is the other half: your outgoing and incoming connection requests, which you accept or decline, plus everyone you're actively connected to.
4Messages, and one very good composer
The Messages tab is a conversation list on the left, the thread on the right, and it includes a private Personal Notes conversation for jotting links and drafts to yourself. Every conversation, direct message or project channel, uses the same composer: Markdown and code plus an emoji picker; image attachments you can paste, drag and drop, or pick (scanned on ingest, then rendered inline); @mentions that notify the person and are kept only while their name is still in your text; asset references, so you can attach a link to one of your assets or issues and let a collaborator jump straight to it; and a GIF picker of safe-filtered, properly attributed results.
5Project channels, the feed, and the docked messenger
The Projects tab gives you a chat channel per project you're a member of, each with an unread count, so a series has one obvious place its conversation lives. The Feed tab is a social feed of posts from your connections. And you never have to sit on the Collaborate page to talk: a Messages icon in the header opens a dropdown of your conversations (with search, and your pinned Personal Notes), and picking one opens a compact chat window docked in the corner that stays with you while you work elsewhere.
Get the console working for you
Be findable, then be in touch. Links into the app. Saved on this device.
Quick questions
Because messaging is for colleagues you're connected with. Fans interact by following, subscribing and commenting in public. Community, on the fan side, has no direct messages at all.
Through the Find tab's directory, filtered by the roles you carry: Artist, Writer, or Critic. Reader is the baseline role everyone has. If you want writing work, make sure you carry the writer role.
A private conversation with yourself, pinned in your message list, for jotting links and drafts. It uses the same composer as everything else.
Yes. The composer supports asset references: attach a link to one of your assets or issues and they can jump straight to it from the message.
No. The Messages icon in the header opens your conversations, and picking one docks a compact chat window in the corner that stays open while you work elsewhere. That icon is the only way in; there's no floating bubble.
In the Projects tab: one chat channel per project you're a member of, each with its own unread count.
The workroom is open
Roles set, people found, channels active, and a messenger that stays with you as you work. Now go and meet them.