Napkin

Napkin is the suite's scratch space for the thinking that happens before the structured work — a full-bleed canvas to draw on, plus flat docs and sheets for the writing and the numbers that don't want a canvas. Every surface is multiplayer by a share link, and every surface is visible to zv1, so the scratch work stops being invisible to the AI that works alongside you.

The surface

Two views, no ceremony between them:

• The gallery — a card grid of your workspace's sketches, each with a live thumbnail and its last-touched time. New sketch creates a board immediately and drops you on the canvas — draw first, name it later. Rename and archive live on each card; archiving clears a sketch out of the gallery without deleting anything.
• The board — the full-bleed drawing surface. A floating tool rail on the left, restyle controls that appear over whatever you select, zoom in the corner. A blank sketch opens ready to draw; one with content opens fitted to the ink, in select mode.

What makes it different

Sketches made of real things

Beyond ink, shapes, text, stickies, and pasted images, a Napkin board can hold reference cards for live workspace entities — Workbench flows, Compass pages, Caliper datasets and evals, Ledger decisions, other sketches. Press @, search, and drop the actual thing onto the board, then wire cards together with connectors that re-route as you rearrange. Double-click a card and you're looking at the real entity. See Reference cards & connectors.

Everyone's there, live

A sketch is a multiplayer surface by default. Workspace teammates on the same board see each other's cursors — named and colored — and every stroke as it lands. Share links extend that outside the workspace: anyone with a link joins anonymously with a view or draw grant and is sketching within seconds, no account. See Multiplayer & share links.

Not everything is a picture

Alongside the canvas, Napkin has two flat surfaces from the same gallery: docs (plain-markdown documents you write in blocks) and sheets (small multi-tab spreadsheets where every tab is a SQL table you — and zv1 — can query, with live charts and CSV/Excel import). Both are multiplayer and both are visible to zv1. See Docs & sheets.

zv1 sees the picture

Ask zv1 about a sketch and it actually looks at it — the layout, the arrows, the handwriting, the sticky notes — and answers about what's drawn. Sketches show up in chat as clickable cards with live thumbnails. See zv1 can see your sketches.

Start here

Access

Napkin runs in the browser at napkin.zerowidth.ai — sign in and pick the Napkin tile from your workspace. There's no separate install. Sketches belong to the workspace: teammates see the same gallery you do.