Creating timelines: best tools and design tips to use

Choosing the right timeline creation tools

Before you get started, you need the right tools for creating timelines. With plenty of options available, choosing the best depends on your budget and what you need.

Do you need to work with others?

Do you want to add interactive sections?

Are there templates?

Knowing what you want will help you find the best tool to create beautiful and informative timelines, much like how understanding your goals makes broader website production more effective.

Factors to consider when selecting a timeline tool

When choosing a timeline, there are several things to consider:

• Ease of use — A user-friendly interface prevents frustration
• Templates — Save time and offer inspiration
• Customization — Ability to change colors, fonts, and add images
• Collaboration features — Useful for team projects
• Interactive elements — Engages viewers with clickable or animated content

Top tools for engaging timeline creation

Here’s a quick look at some top choices:

Visme

This easy-to-use online timeline maker allows you to create professional-looking timelines, infographics and presentations.

Pricing: A free plan with limited features, paid starting at $12.25/month with a year plan.

Venngage

Known for its great templates and easy design tools, Venngage is perfect for creating beautiful timelines with little effort. It provides a drag-and-drop interface and a variety of pre-designed templates.

Pricing: Free plan available with limited features, paid starting at $10/month with a yearly plan.

Microsoft PowerPoint

While PowerPoint isn’t just a timeline tool but a classic presentation tool, it is widely available and familiar to many users.

Pricing: Standalone $179.99 or included in Microsoft 365 subscriptions for $99/year for home and $6/month when billed annually.

Discover features in your timeline tools

Lastly, make sure you play around with the software!

The best timeline tools come packed with features and the more you explore, the more you’ll find unique ways to bring your data to life.

Try out the templates, layouts, colors and animations to see what works best for your project. Some tools even offer AI-powered visualizations and interactive elements — great for creating more dynamic timelines with minimal effort.

As you test the tools, you’ll better understand what works best for you and your project.

Crafting your timeline’s content

Now that you’ve landed on a tool, you can build out your timeline. Start by thinking about the main message or story you want to tell, ensuring your website content aligns with your timeline’s purpose for maximum impact.

Are you showcasing historical events, explaining a project roadmap or sharing a company’s milestones?

Identifying key events and milestones

Choose relevant information and combine it clearly and engagingly to connect with your audience.

1. List all relevant events — Collect the important dates, details and information that matter for your timeline.
2. Prioritize key moments — Pick the most important milestones.
3. Arrange in chronological order — Put those key points in chronological order, creating a logical sequence of events.
4. Add descriptions — Add brief contextual text, start and end dates, and include any key deadlines or achievements.

Structuring your timeline for maximum impact

How you arrange your timeline matters…and it’s not just about looks.

The design and structure you choose impact how easy it is to read and understand the timelines. Play around with different layouts — go horizontal or vertical or get creative with a non-linear design (yes, they exist! We’ll explain in a sec).

Here’s a quick look at which structures work best for which scenarios:

• Vertical timeline: Ideal for mobile-friendly content, presentations and digital storytelling. Best for historical events, resumes and company progressions.
• Horizontal timeline: Works well for printed materials, slideshows and project planning. Common in business roadmaps, infographics and Gantt charts.
• Non-linear timeline: Used for complex relationships, cyclical processes or decision trees. Perfect for showing cause-effect patterns, parallel developments or iterative cycles.

As far as design goes, think of your timeline as a visual map. Use larger fonts and boldly highlight major events to capture attention. Similar to how a sitemap helps visitors navigate and understand your site with ease.

The idea is to create instant understanding and keep your audience locked in.

We’ll dig deeper into design tips in the next section.

Enhancing your timeline with visuals

A clear structure is a good start, but intentional design choices will make your timeline more exciting and engaging. Use icons, images and color schemes to both draw people in and help them understand.

This also applies when learning how to design a website, too, by the way; visual hierarchy, color schemes and image and layout choices all influence usability and engagement.

Selecting appealing visual elements

Choosing the right visuals can significantly affect how your timeline looks and works.

• Choose a cohesive color scheme — The color scheme should fit with your brand or the topic. Use two to three matching colors to keep everything looking good without being too overwhelming.
• Incorporate relevant visuals — Complement the text by adding graphics, photos, illustrations or videos that relate to and reinforce key points.
• Use easy-to-read fonts — For the main text, choose a font that’s easy to read. You can jazz things up with a bolder or fancier font for the headings and important dates.

Integrating icons for clarity

Timelines have treasure-map-like tendencies and what makes treasure maps easy to understand?

The icons.

Think treasure chest, X marks the spot, that sort of thing. They also act as legend, creating consistent meaning across the entire timeline.

Prioritize choosing images that pop and match the events you’re showing. Also, this is where you can add a touch of personality to make your timeline unique and representative of you or your company.

Don’t overload it though — keep things clean, appealing and straightforward.

• Use icons to represent event types — For example, a flag for milestones or a clock for deadlines.
• Maintain a consistent icon style — Uniformity enhances professionalism.
• Avoid visual clutter — Balance text and visuals to maintain clarity.

How to make a timeline

Now that you’ve picked the right timeline to make for the job, let’s go through the steps of designing and building one from start to finish.

1. Choose the type of timeline

The first order of business is selecting the right style of timeline. Different styles serve different purposes, so choosing one that aligns with your content and audience’s needs is essential.

• Horizontal timelines — The standard format, ideal for historical events, company roadmaps, biographies and process visualizations. It’s widely used in infographics, presentations and websites.
• Project timelines & Gantt charts — Common in project management for tracking milestones, deadlines and task dependencies.
• Vertical timelines — Preferred for presentations, mobile-friendly layouts and situations where horizontal space is limited.
• Interactive timelines — Increasingly popular for digital experiences, allowing users to explore events by scrolling, zooming or clicking.
• Dynamic timelines — These can update in real time, making them great for live projects and evolving data sets.

2. Organize and visualize the time

The main idea of most timelines is to show how things unfold over time, just like how your website structure guides users through your site. Here’s how to nail it on the timeline:

1. Define your timeframe —Figure out what timeframe you want to cover. Make sure it fits the story you’re trying to tell. For example, if you create a website to sell products, a timeline is a great way to showcase your brand’s journey.
2. Arrange events in chronological order — List your events in the order they happened. This helps people understand how things connect and what came before what.
3. Differentiate past, present and future events — Use visual cues to make it easy to follow. Colors, different arrow styles or even little icons can help show what happened in the past, what’s happening now and what might happen in the future.

3. Finalize and customize

Once your timeline is structured, it’s time to customize and refine it to both align it with your brand’s style and ensure it works well for your project goals.

Here’s what to focus on:

• Accuracy — Double-check dates, events and sequences to ensure everything is correct and logically ordered.
• Readability — Adjust font sizes, spacing and color contrast to make key information stand out.
• Branding — Use company colors, logos or a style that matches your theme for consistency.
• Refined visuals — Ensure icons, images and markers are well-placed and easy to interpret.
• Narrative clarity — Share your timeline with a colleague or audience sample to ensure it’s engaging and easy to follow.

4. Download and share

Once you complete your timeline, it’s time to share it!

These are the most common formats for exporting and embedding into your presentations.

Now you’re ready to create your timeline!

Creating a great timeline is like putting together a puzzle. You need the right pieces, a good story to tell and the tools to build it.

Follow the four steps in this guide and you’re on your way to a well-crafted timeline that not only organizes information but also makes it engaging and easy to understand. Whether for project planning, historical storytelling or business strategy, timelines help bring information to life.

Frequently asked questions