Two changes are now live in Pencil. A redesigned left panel, and a single place to answer "what needs me right now?"
🧭 A new left panel, four clear tabs
The problem.
Everything in Pencil lived behind one panel. As we've added workflows, agents, Canvas, and chat, that panel has been doing too many jobs at once, finding what you needed meant knowing where it was buried.
The solution.
Four distinct tabs, each with one job.
- Home: Files, workflows, agents, Canvas, and every other surface area in Pencil.
- Chat: A dedicated space for all your conversations with agents.
- Inbox: Everything you need to know about or act on.
- Search: Existing workspace search, now with its own front door.
Same functionality, far less hunting.
🔔 Inbox
The problem.
Pencil had no notification surface. When a brief was submitted, a reviewer was added, a comment tagged someone, an asset was about to expire, or an export finished, that signal stayed buried wherever it happened, in a canvas, a thread, a project. Users either stumbled on these moments by chance or missed them entirely. That's costly in enterprise accounts, where multiple stakeholders coordinate across briefs, reviews, and approvals: missed deadlines, expired assets going live, decisions stalling because nobody knew they were owed. Pencil quietly piled up work waiting on you that you never saw.
The solution
Inbox is a per-user, triageable queue, organized around what you have to do with an item, not where it came from. Three categories in the left rail:
- Activity: Things that happened. Brief submitted, export finished, deliverable approved or rejected.
- Mentions: You've been pulled in. Added as a reviewer, @-mentioned in a comment.
- Decisions: Action required. Asset expiration approvals, deliverables ready for review, alerts that need a response.
Agent, brand, and project become metadata on the item rather than the organizing principle. Every item deep-links straight to the object it came from, the comment, the asset, the export, not just the parent page.
How it works.
- An action happens: an agent, a teammate, or a system event.
- The item lands in exactly one category, unread.
- You act inline where the item allows it: approve a decision, snooze it, mark it read, all without leaving the Inbox.
- Or click through to the source surface in full context.
Beyond the app.
Emails are now included to notifications so that when things happen when you're not using the product, you're still in the loop.
