a cover chosen for every episode

the short version

every episode now gets a cover the moment its file is made, without you opening anything. underway lifts a line you said, puts it over a frame of you, in your brand, and keeps it. the vault, the player, your page and youtube all show it. change it whenever you like, and once you do, it is yours.

• the words are yours: a line lifted from what you said, the same way suggest other words picks them, never a line written for you
• the picture is yours: a frame of you a third of the way into the episode, or the title card on a podcast
• round-ups get one the same way, from a line said in the week, with the round-up's own label
• every clip gets one too: its opening line over the frame it opens on
• an episode that reaches its file with no name is named from the transcript, the same way write it for me does

why it changed

youtube picks a thumbnail from the video whatever happens. press publish without choosing one and it still has a picture, just not a good one. underway was the opposite: the cover was made the first time you opened the share tab. open every episode and the vault looked like a series. skip one on a busy day and that tile sat there in a different style from the rest, a bare still with a label laid over it, the odd one out on the shelf.

that is the wrong way round for a product whose whole job is to take the overhead out of documenting. a founder who films every day should not also have to remember to visit every episode to make it look finished. the shelf should look like a series because it is one, not because you did the admin.

so the cover is no longer a step. it is part of making the file, the way the captions and the title card are.

how it chooses

when the render machine finishes an episode, it reads what you said in it and lifts three short lines that stand on their own: a number, a name, the thing that broke, the decision you made. it can trim the start and end of a sentence and fix the capitals. it cannot add a word, change one or reorder them. the strongest line goes on the cover and the other two are kept, so on share you can switch to either with one press.

the frame behind the words is the one the cover designer has always started from: a third of the way in, once you have warmed up, in the middle of an answer. a podcast has no footage, so its cover is the title card with your line on it. the cover is drawn in the episode's own shape and in the other one too, portrait for tiktok and instagram, wide for youtube and linkedin, so every place it goes gets the right picture.

nothing about this is generated art. there is no image model anywhere in underway. the cover is your face and your words, set in your brand, which is the only kind of cover that belongs in front of a real diary.

your choice always wins

the automatic cover is marked as automatic, and share says chosen for you above it. the moment you change anything, the words, the line, the frame, or turn the cover off, it becomes your cover and the mark goes. nothing automatic ever writes over a cover you chose, on any device, and a cover you chose before this change is left exactly as it was.

the same goes for names. an episode is only named for you when it has no name at all, or only the placeholder a co-host conversation starts with. a name you typed is never touched.

what you see while it is drawn

a cover takes a moment after the file is made. until it arrives, the tile and the player show the dark studio with the episode's name on it and a quiet line that says drawing the cover. never a blank tile, never the old still with a label on it. on the web and on the phone it is the same.

episodes made before this

finished episodes that never had a cover chosen are picked up too: the server works through anything still missing a cover or a name, a couple at a time, and a tile that has no recipe yet shows the cover the server draws for it in the meantime. episodes already posted stay as they were posted.

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