One folder per client
Folders in Projects now hold a client's conversations, material and images — and instructions that go with every message in the folder. The instructions sit on top of your brand, never instead of it, and that order is the point.
Your brand kit answers one question: who are we? Colours, type, logo, tone of voice. It is the same whether you are making a deck for an investor or a post about the summer opening.
Most work also has a second question: what is this job? Who is the customer, what has already been said to them, what must not be promised, who will read it. For an agency, or for anyone running a campaign over several weeks, that answer is different for every client and every series — and until now it had to be explained again at the start of every conversation.
Folders in Projects are where that second answer lives now.
What a folder holds
A folder gathers what belongs to one client or one series: conversations, material and images. Each folder has its own page with all four, and its own box to start a conversation in.
It also has Instructions: what ANVL should know about the assignment. Who it is aimed at, what has already been said, what to avoid. They hold up to 8,000 characters, and they go with every message in the folder's conversations — which is why there is a ceiling at all.
Start a conversation from the folder's page and it carries the folder's instructions and images. What gets built in it lands in the folder. Documents you attach in the conversation follow the folder the whole way. The conversation shows where it lives: on a computer the folder's name stands before the conversation's, with an arrow back; on a phone it sits above it, with Open the folder in the menu.
The instructions do not stop at the conversation. Decks and posts built in the folder follow them directly.
The order: brand first, then the job
Here is the decision that took the longest. What happens when a folder's instructions and the brand disagree?
The instructions are laid on top of the brand. They can add to it — this customer reads on a phone, never mention the price — but they can never change its colours, its tone or its channel rules. When they collide, the brand wins.
That can look backwards. Surely the specific instruction should beat the general rule? But think about who writes each one. The brand kit is the company's agreed identity, maintained on purpose. Folder instructions are written quickly, by whoever set the folder up, for one job. If a hurried line in a folder could turn the logo blue, the brand would only be as reliable as the last person who typed into a folder.
So the folder tells ANVL about the job. The brand tells it whose name the job goes out under, and that does not change from one conversation to the next.
One more guard in the same spirit: in a folder with instructions, the conversation asks before it saves a preference to your brand memory. It comes as a card you tick yourself. Something true of this client should not quietly become something true of you.
The same folder everywhere
A folder is the same folder in Projects and in the image bank. New folder and Move to folder work in both. Add images on a folder's page opens the image bank with the folder selected, and images uploaded there, or saved from the image generator, land in the folder.
When something is built in the folder, its images are a selection to choose from, not a list that all has to be used.
Material in a folder has the same menu as in Projects — open, rename, duplicate, share, move to the bin — plus Remove from folder. Delete a folder and the material and images stay, just without a folder.
Under Projects in the menu on the left, the three most recently used folders are listed, with All folders under them. If you have no folders, the menu looks as it did.
The folders you already had in Projects are still there, with the same names and the same contents.
Where this is going
At launch, the conversations in a folder were your own. Since then a folder can be shared with the team, and the instructions can be written by answering ANVL's questions instead of facing an empty box — but the shape was set here.
If you are evaluating ANVL with several clients or campaigns in mind, that is the split to look at: the brand for whose name it carries, and a folder for each job — its instructions, its images, its conversations and everything they produced, in one place.