LOFTai › Your First Hour

0:00 · Sign In & Get Your Bearings

Goal: a project of your own, and enough of a map that nothing in the UI is a mystery. Ten minutes.

Step 1 — Sign in and land

Signing in drops you on the Projects page — your home base for as long as you use Loft. If your org already has projects, you'll see them as cards; a view toggle in the toolbar switches to a table.

Note: Local track: open LoftDesktop instead of a browser and sign in there. Everything below looks the same — the desktop app is the same interface with the ability to reach your local drive.

Step 2 — Make a project

  1. Click New Project.
  2. Enter a name and initials — both required. Initials are the short code you'll see everywhere, so keep them short and distinct (e.g. DEMO).
  3. Pick a project type. This is the one choice worth thinking about: it seeds your starting libraries, so you don't begin from an empty structure.
  4. Optionally set an accent color, a description, and start/due dates.
  5. Click Save. Loft opens the new project's Project Detail page and the sidebar switches to that project.
Tip: Don't agonize over the project type — you can add or remove libraries later. For this hour, any type with a Shots or Characters library is a good pick.

Step 3 — The 60-second tour

Before you touch anything else, learn the two pieces of furniture you'll use all hour.

The sidebar (left) is grouped:

  • OVERVIEW — Projects, My Tasks, My Queue, Search, Explore, Composer, Flows
  • LIBRARIES — this project's asset categories; where your work lives (Local mode adds a "Files" entry that browses your folder directly)
  • MANAGE — Tasks, Types, Libraries, Primers, Queue, Costing
  • ADMIN — Models, Users, Groups, Settings

The header (top) carries the things you reach for constantly:

  • Quick Search — Cmd + K / Ctrl + K jumps anywhere without navigating
  • Assistant — the conversational agent, opens as a side panel you can work alongside
  • The credits chip — your balance; click it for the wallet
  • The bell — while anything of yours is generating the badge turns amber and counts those jobs, and the panel lists them at the top; click one to jump to the folder its output will land in. Below that are your recent notifications — opening the panel clears the unread count
  • The user menu (where dark/light mode lives)

Step 4 — Give the project a face

On Project Detail, hover the large preview area and drop in an image (PNG/JPG/WebP). Small thing, but it's the fastest way to make the Projects page readable once you have more than three projects.

While you're here, note two hover-revealed buttons in the header — the pencil (edit name, dates, visibility) and the book (Project Playbook). You'll use the book in lesson 4.

Checkpoint

  • You're on a Project Detail page with your project's name at the top.
  • The sidebar has a LIBRARIES group with at least one library in it.
  • You can press Cmd/Ctrl+K and get a search palette, then dismiss it.

If LIBRARIES is empty, your project type didn't seed any — that's fine, you'll create one in the next lesson.

Note: Reference topics for this lesson: Projects and Project Detail.