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Timeline

Events placed on an honest time axis, milestones highlighted.

1 timeline example

Startup milestones

Eighteen months from founding to a hundred customers, spaced by real elapsed time.

The spacing is honest: events sit where they happened, so a quiet stretch reads as a quiet stretch. Labels alternate above and below the baseline, and the launch is the one milestone drawn in the accent.

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What is a timeline?

A timeline places events in chronological order along a time axis, so you can see what happened when and how far apart things were. A good timeline is proportional: equal distances on the axis mean equal amounts of time.

Read it from left to right or top to bottom. Each marker is an event with a date and a short label, and the important milestones are usually emphasized so the story stands out from the routine entries.

When to use a timeline

  • Use it to tell a company or product history, such as a startup's path from founding to Series A.
  • Use it in incident reviews to lay out exactly what happened and when.
  • If you need durations, overlapping tasks and dependencies, use a Gantt chart instead, since a timeline shows points in time rather than work.

How to make a good timeline

  1. Keep the scale honest: do not space a two-week gap the same as a two-year one.
  2. Label every event with a date and a few words, and put details in a note rather than on the axis.
  3. Highlight the three or four milestones that carry the story and leave the rest neutral.
  4. In MakeCharts you can paste a list of dates and events and the timeline is laid out for you.