thumbnail projects

The Brainstorm Tab

Use the Brainstorm mood board to collect references, sticky notes, sketches, and links, and shape the project fields before design starts.

Brainstorm is where a thumbnail project starts — before anyone opens a design tool. It pairs an infinite mood-board canvas with a docked panel for the project's fields and discussion, so the direction is agreed on before design work begins.

The Brainstorm mood board with sticky notes, a reference image, and a link card.

The mood board

The canvas is a pan-and-zoom board you fill with pins. Drag to pan, scroll to zoom, and use the zoom controls in the bottom-left. Everything your team drops here is shared live.

Pick a tool from the floating rail on the left, then click the board to drop a pin.

The Brainstorm canvas tool rail with select, pan, sticky, image, sketch, link, shape, and eraser tools.
  1. Sticky notes

    Drop a colored note for a quick idea, hook line, or constraint. Click to type.

  2. Images

    Upload a reference thumbnail or a raw photo straight onto the board.

  3. Link cards

    Paste a URL — a competitor video, a Figma board, a reference anywhere on the web.

  4. Sketches & shapes

    Rough out a composition freehand, or drop rectangles, ellipses, and arrows to point things out.

Select a pin to move, resize, or rotate it. Select several (drag a marquee, or hold Shift) to move or rotate them as a group. The eraser removes pins as you sweep over them, and Delete removes whatever is selected. Each tool also has a single-key shortcut, shown in its tooltip.

Fields & discussion

The panel on the right has two tabs.

Fields is the shared source of truth for the thumbnail: a summary of what it needs to do, a list of must-haves (constraints like "face must look left" or "no red text"), a due date, and the number of concept approvals required before the project can be published.

The Brainstorm Fields panel with a summary, must-haves, due date, required approvals, and custom fields.

The Fields panel is dynamic. In Manage Fields, you can hide base thumbnail-project fields that your team does not use, reorder them, and add custom fields for information specific to your workflow. The same flexible field system is available on Ideas, Scripts, Calendar Events, and Video Reviews.

Discussion is a threaded conversation for the whole project. Post a thought, reply, react with a thumbs up or down, and @-mention teammates. It is the place for direction-level conversation that is not tied to a specific design.

The Brainstorm discussion panel with a threaded conversation.

Common mistakes

Skipping the fields

A one-line summary plus a couple of must-haves saves rounds of revision later. Designers work from these fields, which also appear on the Designer Panel.

Confusing discussion with design feedback

Use Discussion for overall direction. For notes pinned to a specific version of a design, use pin and region comments on the The Iterate Tab tab instead.

Last updated 2026-08-07