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Ten whiteboard animation videos worth studying — three of ours and seven from elsewhere — with what each one does, why it works, and what you can borrow.
By
Larry Mutenda
Whiteboard animation is a video style where illustrations are drawn onto a white background in time with a voiceover, usually with the drawing hand visible, so the picture builds at the same pace as the argument.
The format dates to around 2008 and has not aged out, because it solves a specific problem: holding attention through an explanation that would be dull as a talking head and unread as a page of text.
Below are ten worth studying, one per company so nothing here repeats a house style. The first three are ours. The rest range from a video watched twenty million times to a B2B explainer with under two thousand views that almost certainly did its job anyway. Run times and view counts were checked in August 2026.
It paces the viewer. The drawing appears at the speed of the narration, so nobody skims ahead or falls behind. Complex ideas arrive in sequence instead of all at once.
It is cheap relative to what it explains. Whiteboard needs illustration and timing, not character rigs, lip sync or lighting. That puts a serious explainer inside a budget that would not cover full 2D or 3D. Current pricing is on our whiteboard animation services page.
It ages slowly. Line art on white does not carry the visual fingerprints of a particular year the way a 3D render or a live-action shoot does. Most of the videos below are more than a decade old and still circulate.
The trade-off is real. Because the style is so plain, a whiteboard video with a weak script has nowhere to hide — the format will not carry a bad argument. See also our video marketing examples and our guide to explainer videos.
Our own work first, then the rest by reach.
Creamy Animation · 1:15 · published November 2020
A whiteboard explainer we produced for a media-literacy programme, defining the difference between misinformation and disinformation. It was built to open a training session rather than to run as a campaign asset.
What to borrow: scope discipline. Seventy-five seconds, two terms defined, nothing else. Most business whiteboard videos fail by trying to cover the product, the market, the objections and the call to action inside ninety seconds. Pick the one idea the viewer has to leave with and let the rest of your funnel do its job.
Creamy Animation · 3:06 · published December 2017
A whiteboard animation we produced for Coast Mental Health, a Vancouver nonprofit providing housing and support services. Three minutes is long for the format; the subject needed the room.
What to borrow: how the drawn style handles a sensitive subject. Live action would have meant showing real people in distress. Line drawing lets you depict a situation honestly without putting a face to it, which is why mental health, healthcare and social services keep returning to this format. More in our mental health video examples.
Creamy Animation · 0:45 · published May 2019
A forty-five-second whiteboard explainer for the BC SPCA on the humane transport of farm animals, and what the public can do about it.
What to borrow: what actually fits in forty-five seconds. One problem, one ask. At this length there is no room for background, so the script has to start at the point of tension rather than build up to it. Short pieces like this work well as social cut-downs of a longer video — but plan them at the script stage, not by trimming afterwards.
Royal Society of Arts · 10:48 · 20.2 million views since April 2010
The RSA took a lecture by Dan Pink on what actually motivates people at work and had it drawn on a whiteboard as he speaks. It is the most-watched whiteboard animation ever made and the video that turned the style from a novelty into a genre. The RSA Animate series ran to a dozen of these; this is the one to watch if you only watch one.
What to borrow: the drawing is argument structure, not decoration. When Pink sets financial incentives against autonomy, the illustration puts them on opposite sides of the board, then returns to that same spatial layout minutes later. The viewer remembers where an idea lives. Nothing moves for the sake of moving.
The Story of Stuff Project · 21:16 · 9.5 million views since April 2009
Annie Leonard walks through the full life cycle of consumer goods: extraction, production, distribution, consumption, disposal. Twenty-one minutes long, which should not work and does.
What to borrow: a repeating visual spine. The five-stage arrow across the bottom of the frame stays on screen throughout and shows you where you are in the argument. On a long video that spine is what stops people leaving. It also predates most of this list — a lot of what became standard whiteboard grammar starts here.
Dr. Mike Evans · 9:18 · 7.0 million views since December 2011
A Toronto physician asks one question — what is the single best thing we can do for our health — and spends nine minutes proving the answer is thirty minutes of walking a day. Drawn on a real whiteboard with a real marker, hand in shot throughout.
What to borrow: build the whole video on one number. The title is the hook, the number is the argument, and every study cited returns to it. Nine minutes is far longer than the usual advice for a marketing video, and it holds because the viewer is never in doubt about what is being proved. If you can reduce your pitch to a single figure a customer will repeat to a colleague, you have a script. This is also the clearest proof that whiteboard suits patient education — see our healthcare video examples.
Common Craft · 2:25 · 3.1 million views since March 2008
Strictly speaking this is not whiteboard animation — it is paper cutouts moved by hand on a white surface. It is here because it came first. Common Craft’s “in Plain English” series predates RSA Animate by two years and set the grammar everything above inherited: white background, hand in frame, one idea introduced at a time, narration carrying the argument.
What to borrow: the title. “Twitter in Plain English” states the subject and the promise in four words, and the video delivers exactly that and stops. If you cannot write that sentence about your own video, the script is not ready.
Born to Learn · 4:55 · 1.1 million views since March 2011
The first in a series on the science of how humans learn, aimed at parents and educators.
What to borrow: restraint in the palette. The video is almost entirely black line on white with one accent colour used sparingly, and the moments colour appears are the moments that matter. Whiteboard animation gets weaker the more colour you add — the power of the format comes from the eye having only one thing to look at. Worth reading alongside our notes on writing an explainer video script.
Produced by Yum Yum Videos · 2:04 · published September 2016
A B2B explainer for McKesson Health Mart, a tool that lets independent pharmacies track and manage their performance, made by the Argentinian studio Yum Yum Videos.
What to borrow: how it handles a boring product. Pharmacy performance management is not inherently interesting, so the video opens on the pharmacist problem — losing ground to the chains — before it names the software. The drawing does the emotional work the product cannot. This is the standard structure for a commercial whiteboard video and it is worth copying directly.
Banner Business Services · 1:34 · published May 2014
An office-supplies company explaining a closed-loop recycling programme to corporate procurement buyers. Under two thousand views, and included deliberately.
What to borrow: the reminder that a whiteboard video does not need an audience to have worked. This one was almost certainly made for sales meetings and tender documents, not for YouTube. It explains a circular supply chain — a process with no obvious visual — in ninety-four seconds, which is precisely the job the format is best at. Judge your own video on whether it shortens a sales conversation, not on its view count.
Across all ten, the same three things hold: the script was finished before anything was drawn, the illustration carries argument rather than decoration, and the palette stays almost empty. None of them is technically elaborate. The RSA video is a marker, a hand and a camera.
That is the honest case for the format and also its limit. Whiteboard animation is affordable because it needs no character rigs, lip sync or lighting — but the same plainness means a weak script has nowhere to hide. If your explanation does not hold up read aloud with no visuals, drawing it will not save it.
We produce whiteboard animation for business and nonprofit clients, and there is more of our work in the portfolio. If you are still choosing a studio, we also keep a list of whiteboard animation companies.
