PROJECT: Inexpensive dry-erase surfaces.

Experiments:

1. Normal wall-hung whiteboards are the usual solution, but they are usually very expensive per square foot. Leverage Research found some used ones (with minor scuffs) for about $3/sqft at a nearby used office supplies liquidator, but if bought new they're more like $5.50/sqft. Note: paint thinner removes old ghosting from used boards.

2. "Whiteboard paint" like IdeaPaint lets you turn a whole wall into a whiteboard for about $4.50/sqft, but lots of reviews say it doesn't erase that well, and has other problems. Also, an organization I'm close to tried this and confirmed that IdeaPaint was terrible.

3. The best-quality (not most popular) "peel and stick" whiteboard appears to be Wall Pops. This has worked surprisingly well during its first week, but I don't know whether it will cling to the wall forever, and one thing to note is that it's so thin that it pics up the texture of the wall you stick it to. You can peel it off the wall and move it to a new location quite easily; it sticks by static. One particular black dry-erase marker didn't dry-erase from this surface hardly at all, for some reason.

4. Shower board (aka "panel board") from Home Depot (or similar) is the classic solution for cheap whiteboard. Almost every "DIY cheap whiteboard!" blog post out there is about using shower board. But in our test, there was significant ghosting & smearing when erasing stuff more than 4 days old, or when erasing stuff written in the past 60 seconds.

5. MagnaTag and MyWhiteBoards have solutions for whole-wall whiteboard panels, but they're not particularly cheap.

6. Our office has lots of large windows, and dry erase markers work just fine on glass, but you really need a white background so that what you have enough contrast to read what you've written. We're looking at drop-down white backgrounds (like you use with a projector) that we might mount in our large wall-windows, but we haven't tested that yet. We also haven't yet tested the liquid chalk markers that are supposedly more readable on glass than normal dry-erase markers.

7. Clear ones like at Clear Future are classy, but they're not particularly cheap, and you have to solve the same contrast problem as with the windows in (6).

8. At the July research workshop we resorted to using large Post-It papers rather than whiteboard; this worked okay in a pinch but gets clumsy pretty quickly.