A timeline provides a visual representation of events that helps you better understand history, a story, a process or any other form of an event sequence arranged in chronological order and displayed along a line (usually drawn left to right or top to bottom). It explains what happened during a certain period or to a particular person, starting with the earliest event and moving forward through time. Increasingly, timelines are illustrated in infographics combining text and graphic images for a better presentation.

A timeline is useful to document for any type of development, providing an easy-to-understand history and helping viewers to understand past and ongoing quickly.

Timeline example: History of AI

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Timeline for Project Manager

In project management, knowing how to create a project timeline is one of the most essential skills a project manager, as a timeline are most useful for showing important milestones, deadlines and other significant dates and events over the lifecycle of the project. Building comprehensive, accurate timelines will help a manager get every project off on the right foot.

In the example below, the timeline shows important events labeled in chronological order on a linear time scale. They are used in project management to help teams and stakeholders understand what milestones the project needs to achieve and the delivery date for each milestone.

Timeline diagram example

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Timelines can also be displayed in Gantt charts style with project schedules.

Timeline example; Gantt chart view

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Off-the-Shelf Timeline Infographics

Visual Paradigm provides simple timeline templates that can help you make some good highlights on a series of events that have taken place in a certain timeframe. Whether it’s the history of your company, a roadmap of your project or a schedule of your implementation plan, a timeline infographic is the best way to communicate your message through storytelling matter. Creating a timeline infographics from scratch can to time-consuming and overwhelming, just adopt one of our nice timeline templates that you can jumpstart your design straight-away!

Timeline Examples

The best way to understand timelines is to look at some examples of timelines. Click and edit on any of these off-the-shelf timelines templates for jumpstarting your design:

Vertical timeline example

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