It seems that everywhere I look I’m seeing multimedia timelines. In fact, the latest Articulate Weekly E-learning Challenge involves building an interactive timeline. While I didn’t tackle the weekly challenge, I’ve been thinking about making a simple timeline template for a while.
First off, here is the published Timeline Template for you to check out. And here is the free source file for you to use in your own projects. If the fonts aren’t displaying right, here is what I used. For the title and year text I used ChunkFive and for the copy text I used Open Sans.
I started off with a “regular” look, but decided to give it more of a flat design look. Ironically, Tom Kuhlmann just wrote a post about giving your old course a new look by transforming it into a flat design.
This is a pretty simple timeline template as far as content placement. I placed text descriptions on the left and any media (pics, videos, etc.) on the right. I decided to forego a lot of animation and just focus on the straight timeline effects. The trickiest part of the timeline is getting the previous/next arrows to work in conjunction with the timeline radio buttons. The radio buttons on the timeline jump to each decade whereas clicking the next/previous arrows advance to specific years within that decade. I recorded the following Screenr to describe how I fixed the selected states on the radio buttons. Let me know what you think!