Give it the events. It orders them, shortens the labels to something readable at a glance, draws the spine, and marks where today sits — for a company history, a roadmap, or a subject that only makes sense chronologically.
Make a timeline freeTimeline
How the internet
got everywhere
1969
First message sent between two computers
1989
The web is proposed at CERN
2007
The internet moves into a pocket
2026
Two thirds of humanity online
Illustrative · Made with Infographic Generator AI
Founding, the pivot, the first big customer, the funding, today. Five to eight entries — a company history with twenty entries is an archive, not a story.
Watch out — Do not include an entry only because it was hard. Include it because it changed what happened next.
What shipped, what is shipping, what is planned. Mark the boundary between done and promised clearly, and date the promises loosely.
Watch out — A roadmap read as a commitment is how a timeline becomes a complaint. Say “planned” on the sheet.
Phases with owners and dates, so everybody looking at the wall knows what week the project is in.
Watch out — Show dependencies as an order, not as arrows crossing the page. If the arrows cross, it is a diagram, not a timeline.
The history of the internet, of a treaty, of a disease. The classic educational timeline, and the one people share most.
Watch out — Cite the dates. A shared timeline that gets a date wrong travels further than the correction.
Ten quiet years and one decisive month should not get space in proportion to their length — unless the passage of time is itself the point, in which case say so on the sheet.
Below four, a timeline is a list. Above eight it becomes a scroll, and the reader loses the shape that made the format worth using.
The label is a headline, not a summary. If an entry needs three lines, it wants its own sheet.
Years for decades of history, months for a year of a project. Mixing “2019” with “14 March” makes the reader do conversion work.
Every timeline that runs to today should show where today is. Without it, a reader cannot tell history from plan.
A list of events with dates, in any form — bullet points, a paragraph of history, a spreadsheet with a date column, or a document that contains the sequence. It will order them and shorten the labels.
Choose the wide shape for a horizontal spine suited to slides, or portrait for a vertical spine that reads well on a phone and prints on A4.
Technically many, usefully four to eight. If you have thirty, split them into eras and make one sheet per era, or make one sheet of the eras themselves.
Yes — ask for the planned entries to be shown as planned and they are drawn distinctly from the ones that have happened.
Yes. Save a brand kit and the spine, nodes and labels are all drawn in your palette.
PNG, SVG or PDF, or a share link. SVG is the one to pick if the timeline is going on a wall — it stays sharp at any size.