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Whiteboard is finally black on white

The style everyone starts with was called Whiteboard and drew in red, blue and green. Its own recipe asked for it. So the first look anybody met, the one the site leads with, was never quite the thing it was named. It is now a black marker on a clean white board: one confident line, no fill, nothing coloured. If you liked the colour, it did not go anywhere.

Colored whiteboard is its own style now

Every object outlined in black and filled with a bright dry-erase colour, the way a teacher draws with a full set of pens. Colour follows what a thing is, so a sun is yellow and water is blue. It suits nature, science and how-things-work subjects, where the colour is part of the explanation rather than decoration. Three of the videos in our gallery were already drawn this way.

A page that just shows you the styles

Until now the only place to see a look was inside Studio, after a storyboard had been generated, which meant spending part of a video to answer "what do these look like?". There is a Styles page in the app now. Every style is a row, and each row shows the same five scenes: a process, some numbers, a diagram, people, and a frame carrying only words. Every style is drawn on those same five, so you are comparing looks rather than comparing a water cycle against a rocket. Click a row and Studio opens with that look already chosen.

How to use now teaches the script format

The page used to explain the buttons and stop there. It now shows a real script, both the plain kind where a blank line starts a new picture and the tagged kind where you say exactly what is spoken, what is written on the picture, what is drawn and how long it holds. Everything on that page is read out of the code that actually parses your script, so it says what will happen rather than what we remember.

Also fixed

• Style pictures were served through a narrow door and a page showing several of them lost some to an error. A different few failed each time you reloaded, which made it look like the pictures themselves were broken. They were not.
• Studio was pinned narrower than the rest of the app, so a wide screen left it in a column.
• The privacy policy described joining a waiting list that the site no longer offers.