Whiteboard and Illustrated Explainers: Where They Still Work

Why the hand drawn explainer became a cliché, the situations where it remains the best choice, and how to use it without dating the content.

The whiteboard explainer, a hand drawing a diagram while a voice explains, was ubiquitous for a period and then became a signal of a certain era of corporate content. That reputation is partly deserved and it has caused the format to be dismissed in situations where it remains the clearest available option.

What the format does well is unusual and worth naming. It builds an idea in front of the viewer at the pace of the explanation, which means the visual and the verbal arrive together rather than competing. It handles abstraction without inventing metaphor. And the act of drawing carries attention: the eye follows a line being made in a way it does not follow a completed diagram.

That last property has support in the instructional literature. Beege and Ploetzner (2025), studying learning from interactive video, examined how design and cognitive load influence what learners take from video material, and Ludwig et al. (2026) found that instructional design and cognitive load affect knowledge acquisition and problem solving. Progressive construction is precisely the mechanism that keeps load manageable, and the drawn explainer is progressive construction by nature.

Where the format is the right answer is identifiable. Explaining a relationship between abstract entities. Walking through a process with several stages. Building a framework or a model. Teaching a concept where the visual is a diagram rather than a depiction. In each case the alternative treatments are worse: footage requires metaphor, and dimensional rendering adds perspective that the diagram does not need.

Where it fails is equally clear. Anything requiring a physical object to be understood. Anything where the brand's positioning is premium, since the drawn look reads as informal. Anything emotional, because a line drawing cannot carry feeling the way a face can. And any subject the audience already understands, where the slow construction becomes tedious rather than clarifying.

The reason the format dated is that it was applied to all of these indiscriminately, in a single default style, with the same stock hand and the same marker. Avoiding that is a design problem rather than a technical one: the illustration style should come from the brand, the palette should be the brand's, and the hand should either be absent or be a deliberate choice rather than an inherited convention.

Removing the hand is worth considering because it is the element that most dates the format. Elements that draw themselves, or that assemble progressively without a visible hand, retain the pedagogical benefit and lose the era signal. This is a small change with a disproportionate effect on how contemporary the piece reads.

Pacing is where most illustrated explainers fail in practice. The drawing must keep up with the narration, and when it cannot the film either speeds the drawing into illegibility or slows the narration into tedium. The correction is to draw less: fewer elements, simpler forms, and the acceptance that a diagram assembled from four shapes communicates more than one assembled from twenty.

Colour should be constrained rather than decorative. Jonauskaite et al. (2020) documented consistent patterns of emotion associations with colours, and in a diagrammatic treatment colour is doing semantic work, marking what is important, what is being compared, what has changed. Using the full palette because the format allows it removes that function.

A designed character or guide can sit inside this treatment effectively. Li et al. (2022) found that animated pedagogical agents enhanced learning outcomes during learning, and Liew et al. (2022) examined how an agent's emotional presentation influenced mental effort and learning performance. A consistent figure drawing the explanation gives a series coherence and gives the viewer someone to follow, which is a stronger use of the convention than the anonymous disembodied hand it replaced.

References

Beege, M., & Ploetzner, R. (2025). Learning from interactive video: The influence of self-explanations, navigation, and cognitive load. Instructional Science, 53(1), 99–119. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11251-024-09693-5

Ludwig, S., Rausch, A., & Taub, M. (2026). Effects of instructional design, instructional preferences, and cognitive load on problem solving and knowledge acquisition in a computer-based office simulation. Learning and Instruction, 101, Article 102255. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.learninstruc.2025.102255

Jonauskaite, D., Parraga, C. A., Quiblier, M., & Mohr, C. (2020). Feeling blue or seeing red? Similar patterns of emotion associations with colour patches and colour terms. i-Perception, 11(1), Article 2041669520902484. https://doi.org/10.1177/2041669520902484

Li, W., Wang, F., Mayer, R. E., & Liu, T. (2022). Animated pedagogical agents enhance learning outcomes and brain activity during learning. Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, 38(3), 621–637. https://doi.org/10.1111/jcal.12634

Liew, T. W., Tan, S. M., & Kew, S. N. (2022). Can an angry pedagogical agent enhance mental effort and learning performance in a multimedia learning environment? Information and Learning Sciences, 123(9/10), 555–576. https://doi.org/10.1108/ILS-09-2021-0079