Work together, live

1How a team works here

This is the idea: your team works on the work, not in some other app you have to keep in sync. Every issue (an asset) carries a docked shelf holding three things: Tasks, a Member chat, and Notes. So the conversation, the to-do list, and the scribbled reminders all sit right on the thing you are making. No tab-hopping to coordinate.

The planning Storyboard and the drawing canvas are shared, and you can see who is around at a glance. This tour walks the day to day: get your people in, work an asset together through the shelf, watch presence, then go live to draw and plan at the same moment. Setting up roles and finding people are their own guides, linked at the end.

2Get your people in

Getting a teammate onto the work is two moves, and the order matters: studio first, then project. Start at your studio's Members tab (the Manage sub-tab), or in Settings under Studios, and hit Add a member. Grab someone you already know with Add a connection by name, or reach a newcomer through Or invite by email and Invite. Set their studio role under Add as: Owner, Admin, Editor or Viewer. Now open the project's Collaborators page and add them there. You can only pick from people already in the studio, and each collaborator automatically gets access to every asset in this project. That is the handshake.

3The shelf on every asset

Open any asset and look to the right edge: a slim tab rail is pinned there, the Work Shelf. It rides along on every kind of asset (comic, book, podcast, bundle, all of them) and on the drawing canvas and the Storyboard too, so it is always the same place wherever the work takes you. Three built-in tabs: Tasks for what needs doing, Member chat for talking it over, and Notes for the loose ends. Click a tab and its panel slides out; click it again, or hit the panel's close X, to tuck it away. Only one panel shows at a time, and the shelf remembers your pick per asset, so each thing you make keeps its own last-open view.

4Tasks that sit on the work

The shelf's Tasks panel is this asset's to-do list, right where the drawing happens. Hit Add a task, type into the composer (New task... (@ to assign)), and yes, typing @ hands it to a teammate. Add creates it. Each task carries a status you flip from a menu, To Do, In Progress or Done, plus an assignee (or Unassigned if nobody's claimed it yet). Finished work folds away under Done (N), and a clean slate reads No open tasks.

Better still, a task can sit on the art itself. Arm Pin a task, click the exact page or board spot, and it wears a Pinned badge. Click that (Jump to where this task is pinned) and the surface flies straight there.

5Member chat: the asset's group chat

Every asset has a Member chat tab on its shelf, and it is exactly what it sounds like: a group chat for this one issue. Everyone working on the asset is already in it, no inviting required. A fresh asset opens on Start the member chat with the line "Everyone on this asset is here automatically. Anything that needs doing can be turned into a task." Type your first message into the composer, hit Send, and you are off.

Hold one line in your head: chat is for talking, tasks are for doing. This is where the team thinks out loud about this book specifically. The moment a message becomes a decision or a job, turn it into a task so it survives the scroll instead of drowning in it.

6Private chats, right where you work

Sometimes you need a quiet word with one person, not the whole team. That is what a private chat is: a direct message you start without leaving the page. Hit Messages in the canvas toolbar (or on the Storyboard when you are full screen) to open your conversations and begin or resume a DM. It floats in a little window, and when you minimise it, it shrinks to a small avatar "head" that trails you around the app, carrying an unread count. Click the head and the chat pops back open. During a live session, an incoming message opens its own window on its own, so a quick "wait, redraw panel three" never slips past you while you are heads-down drawing.

7Who is around

Working together goes smoother when you can tell who is actually at their desk. Little status dots do exactly that. A bright dot means Online now, so you will probably get a fast reply. An amber one reads like Active 2h ago, meaning they were here recently but may be off making tea. A muted dot is offline: Last online yesterday, or simply Offline. Groups roll it up into a count like 3 online. You will spot these dots on member rosters, in your messages, and on chat windows, so a quick glance tells you who to ping now versus who to leave a note for later.

8Going live: the Enterprise seat

Everything so far works on any plan. Chat, tasks, notes and the shared surfaces all update when you refresh or reopen. Live collaboration is the one exception: several people on the same Storyboard or drawing canvas at once, changes landing within about a second. It rides the Enterprise plan and is billed per person at $50 a seat per month.

Two switches, and you need both. The studio holds the capability, and the owner hands you a seat on the Plan & billing page, under the Live collaboration seats panel, one toggle per member. A seat only decides whether your work streams live. It never changes what you are allowed to do; that is your role, exactly as the panel says: "A seat changes whether someone's work streams live. It never changes what they are allowed to do."

9Drawing together on the canvas

This is what a live seat buys you: two artists draw the same page at once, and each stroke lands on everyone else's screen in about a second. Nobody clicks anything. What keeps it from turning into a brawl is layers. Each person works on their own, and the canvas steers you off whatever layer someone is actively drawing on, so two pens never fight over the same pixels. No lock badge to squint at; it just holds the line. Your undo stays yours and reconciles cleanly with a teammate's edits.

Up top, a little stack of faces shows who is here. Click it for Private chat to DM someone, or Bring them to me to pull their view to exactly where you are looking.

10Planning together on the Storyboard

The Storyboard is where you lay pages out and think on top of them with stickies, arrows and roughs, and it is shared just like the canvas. Open it and you will see an As of stamp marking when it last loaded. Everyone else's changes are waiting there too; you pull them in by reopening or refreshing. Add a live seat and the board keeps itself current within about a second, with a bar showing who is here. Click a name to Message {name}, or hit the magnet to Bring {name} to me so you are both looking at the same corner. And because tasks sit on the board, clicking a task pinned to a page or a spot flies the whole board straight to its pin. Planning and the plan, in one place.

11Who can do what

FoundryInk keeps two role ladders, and it pays to hold them apart. Your studio role covers the whole team: Owner has full control including billing, Admin manages members and roles (but not billing), Editor does the content work, and Viewer is read-only, though they can still comment. Your project role is set per series: Director approves pages and directs production, Author uploads and edits art and scripts, QA reviews, comments and flags but cannot edit, and Viewer just reads (a project Admin sits above all of them). Rule of thumb: to edit art you need Editor plus Author, to approve pages you need Director, and to manage the team you need Owner or Admin.

12Beyond the asset: the Collaborate Console

Member chat is tied to one issue. The Collaborate Console is the other room: the whole studio, and everyone you might work with. Open Find Collaborators to meet people and send a connection request; Connections is where you accept or ignore the ones coming your way. Private messages hold your DMs. Group messages are Slack-style channels: your studio has one, every project has its own with named channels and a general everyone shares. And @mentions work anywhere, pulling in the right teammates and pinging them. So the split is simple: talk about this issue on its Member chat, talk about everything else here.

13Make it work as a team

This is the whole rhythm in one motion. Talk freely in Member chat, but the second a message becomes a job, make it a task and assign it, so nothing important lives only in the scroll where it scrolls away. Pin that task to the exact spot on the art it belongs to, so the fix and the place are one thing. Read the presence dots to know who to ping now and who to catch later. Keep notes for the loose, still-forming stuff. And when you genuinely need to be in the room together, drawing or planning at the same moment, that is what a live seat buys you. A team here works on the work itself, all in one place, so making and coordinating become the same motion.

Questions teams actually ask