Drawing whiteboard

A whiteboard that's always one click away

Perfect for sketching an idea during a video call, roughing out a room layout, letting kids doodle without the mess, or jotting down a thought before it slips away. The canvas works with a mouse as well as a finger or stylus on phones and tablets, and strokes stay smooth because everything happens locally, nothing is ever uploaded to a server.

Getting the most out of the eraser, colors and export

The eraser uses the same brush size you've selected: turn it up to wipe large areas, turn it down for precise touch-ups. The "Clear all" button wipes the whole canvas back to white in one click. When you're happy with your drawing, download it as a PNG: the image is saved at 1000×500 pixels on a white background, ready to share in a chat or drop into a document.

What an empty whiteboard is really for

For explaining. A diagram drawn while talking conveys in ten seconds what three paragraphs cannot say: how two things connect, where the problem is, in what order the steps go. In a video call it is the fastest way to make something genuinely understood, and it needs no software installed at the other end.

Then it is for thinking: the plan of a room before buying furniture, the sketch of an installation, the seating at a table, the family tree someone is trying to describe. And it is for children, who draw without using up paper and without making a mess.

A mouse draws badly, and what to do about it

A mouse is designed for pointing, not for tracing: curves come out angular and lines wobble. Two habits help a lot: moving the whole arm rather than just the wrist, which is what people do at a real whiteboard, and drawing large, because reduced every stroke improves.

If there is a touchscreen or a tablet, a finger is already better than a mouse, and a stylus is better than a finger. But for a diagram made of rectangles, arrows and words a mouse is enough: it is when you try to draw something figurative that the limit shows, and in that case the problem is not the tool.

How to make a diagram people understand

A few rules, all of them old. One colour per meaning, not one per taste: black for the structure, one colour for what you want to highlight, and that is that — three colours are already many. Capital letters, because cursive traced with a mouse is illegible even to whoever wrote it.

And above all leave space: a diagram filling the whole surface can no longer be corrected, and the correction always comes. People drawing on a classroom board start small in a corner for the same reason.

Saving, and what remains

The drawing lives in the page: closing the tab makes it disappear, and the clear button asks for no confirmation. Before closing it is worth downloading the image, which is the only way to keep it.

The file that comes out is an image, so it is no longer editable: it can be cropped, resized, pasted into a document, but the rectangles cannot be moved. If the diagram is something that will have to change over time, this whiteboard serves for the first version, and after that it is better to redo it with a tool that keeps the objects separate.

Nearby tools

For a tree map from an outline there is Concept map, and for a sequence of dates Timeline. On the finished drawing work Resize photo, Write on a photo and Image to PDF.