Introducing tldraw flash
Hi, it’s Max, a tldraw Product Engineer, and Leo and Audrey, the interns here.
Over the past couple of months, we’ve been working on tldraw flash, a new product that lets you quickly create simple, low-fi animations.
It lets you draw (or diagram), record, and edit without leaving the canvas.
It also fills a decade-long gap in software built for easy, hand-drawn animations. Looking ahead, tldraw flash can help you create sketches and prototypes that you can hand over to your AI to build on.
It’s fun, simple, and powerful under the hood. We built it on top of the SDK, using mechanics that already live in the canvas available to all our users.
It’s live now — and it’s free!
What is tldraw flash
tldraw flash is an animation tool built on top of the tldraw SDK. It has all the same functionality as the tldraw you know and love. You can use the tools you’re already familiar with to create shapes, characters, and scenery.
Once you’ve built your scene and character, press record and drag. Flash captures those movements as you record, and rewatching your performance plays those movements back.
When you’re ready, record, drag, record again.
One of the most exciting functionalities of tldraw flash is that it’s performance-based. This means you can move shapes after you’ve animated them, and it’ll be reflected in the recording. So, if you recorded an animation of a bouncing ball, you could drag the ball higher up the frame, and it’ll be in its new position without you having to re-record.
How to use tldraw flash
To get started, you can create your own drawings, or drag some of the pre-made elements on the canvas.
Everything within the camera frame will be captured in the recording. Drag things around with your mouse while recording, and the clips will be captured in the timeline.
You can also use and customize pre-made characters. Right now, those are Guy and Cat — they come with a set of built-in animations (walking, waving, sitting, dancing), and dragging them along a path brings them to life.
You can restyle either of the characters to look completely different, and save them as custom characters. They can even hold things, and those objects will move with them. All you need to do is drag a character onto the board, select the primary animation state, then double-click the parts you want to edit. You can add, edit, or remove the shapes and the animations update with the character you’ve changed.
Thanks to the rigging system under the characters, you can push your customizations pretty far; you can turn two Guys into an animal, by stripping the characters down to just the limbs and rebuilding them, and the underlying animations will still work.
When you’re happy with an animation, you can export it as an MP4, or publish it straight to the gallery, share a link, and let people remix your work.
Browse the gallery for inspiration, or grab something someone else made and riff on.
What you can make
Anything you want! tldraw flash is intentionally low-fi and has a hand-drawn feel. Or, you can import your own assets and give them whatever feel you chose. We want the barrier to making animations to be as low as possible.
tldraw flash isn't limited to recording dragged shapes — you can record drawing, typing text, aligning objects, changing colors, and importing images. Basically, you can capture anything you do on the tldraw canvas, from casual doodles to narrated explainer videos with animated text and annotated infographics.
In fact, we made our tutorials for tldraw flash in tldraw flash.
Built on our infinite canvas, you can get as expansive as you want.
How we built tldraw flash
…Really well and with a lot of care.
Everything from the rigging system, to how we store the recording, and even the UI were all built on mechanics we already had in the tldraw SDK.
We’ll be posting deep dives into both of these elements, so stay tuned.
For now, we’d love to see what you make! Share your animations with us on X and LinkedIn, or join our Discord server.
