Tips to customizing your whiteboard animations

With these uncertain times, when all our day to day activities have been modified, the new “normal” (hopefully temporarily) is based on carrying out most of our activities over the internet, such us meetings, sharing of documents, and learning sessions.

Let’s remember that eLearning has been around for a long time now, but with this pandemic happening, a lot of our clients have turn to making most of their training material into eLearning components. Of course, since there is a lot of material to be “converted”, the need for diversification in the ways we present the material, becomes much more apparent.

One of the ways we have been using to present and condense the content (to make more dynamic while teaching content in short burst, to keep the learners engaged) is by using whiteboard animations. This type of animation, while cartoony, it really is a great tool to translate content into digital material, since it can depict examples or scenarios that can help the learners relate more to the content.

Depending on the tool you use to create whiteboard animations for your online training, there are different levels of customization you can achieve. Here at Pathways, we have used to different tools that help us achieve different levels when it comes to representing content in this format:

• Vyond: This tool is an online platform that allows you to create not only whiteboard animations but also 2D animations. One of the advantages of using this tool is that it comes with a wide variety of character selections, as well as assets and templates that can help you get started quickly with your project, and you can customize your assets up to a certain point, however, this is one of its disadvantages too, because we cannot pass this level of customization so, especially with characters, it becomes tricky because we need to stick to their style and options available.

• VideoScribe: If you want to have a higher level of customization, you will be well suited with this tool, because it doesn’t offer as many assets as Vyond (if any at all), but it will let you import your own assets, which becomes also one of its disadvantages, since you need to create your own illustration in a software like Adobe Illustrator and then import it. Also, custom animations like expressions or actions become more difficult to recreate.