Ah, look at this beautiful timeline that Cassie designed and built—so many beautiful little touches! It covers the fifteen years(!) of Clearleft so far.
But you can also contribute to it …by looking ahead to the next fifteen years:
Let’s imagine it’s 2035…
How do you hope the practice of design will have changed for the better?
Fill out an online postcard with your hopes for the future.
Timelines of people, interfaces, technologies and more:
30 years of facts about the World Wide Web.
I’ve shaped this timeline over five months. It might look simple, but it most definitely was not. I liken it to chipping away at a block of marble, or the slow process of evolving a painting, or constructing a poem; endless edits, questions, doubling back, doubts. It was so good to have something meaty to get stuck into, but sometimes it was awful, and many times I considered throwing it away. Overall it was challenging, fun, and worth the effort.
Simon describes the process of curating the lovely timeline on his personal homepage.
My timeline is just like me, and just like my life: unfinished, and far from perfect.
How cartography made early modern global trade possible.
Maps and legends. Beautiful!
This history of the World Wide Web from 1996 is interesting for the way it culminates with …Java. At that time, the language seemed like it would become the programmatic lingua franca for the web. Brendan Eich sure upset that apple cart.
An ongoing timeline of computer technology in the form of blog posts by Sinclair Target (that’s a person, not a timeslipping transatlantic company merger).
Colour palettes throughout the ages that you can copy and use.
A fascinating treasure trove of objects recovered from the canals of Amsterdam.
Another deep dive into web history, this time on JavaScript. The timeline of JS on the web is retroactively broken down into four eras:
Nice to see “vanilla” JavaScript making a resurgence in that last one.
It’s 2017, the JavaScript ecosystem is both thriving and confusing as all hell. No one seems to be quite sure where it’s headed, only that it’s going to continue to grow and change. The web’s not going anywhere, which means JS isn’t going anywhere, and I’m excited to see what future eras bring us.
Jason lists the stages of gradually turning the Cloud Four site into a progressive web app:
- Jul 13: Our redesign launches
- Oct 3: Service worker added
- Oct 18: More offline functionality and faster performance
- Nov 22: Web notifications
- Dec 7: Small tweaks and “launch”
And you can just keep incrementally adding and tweaking:
You don’t have to wait to bundle up a binary, submit it to an app store, and wait for approval before your customers benefit.
What a great project! A newsletter that focuses on stories from the web’s history, each one adding to an ongoing timeline (a bit like John’s hypertext history).
An illustrated history of digital iconography.
This is rather nice—a Spacelog-like timeline of Apollo 17, timeshifted by exactly 43 years.
Gene and the crew are on their way to the moon …the last humans to ever make the journey.
A breathtaking overview of Cassini’s mission. The timeline video—matching up footage from Saturn with contemporary events on Earth—is a beautiful and haunting dose of perspective.
You can even watch a four hour video of every single one of the 341,805 images that Cassini has sent up till now.
A nice navigable timeline of historical events from Wikipedia.
A nice little pattern for generating a swish timeline in SVG from a plain ol’ definition list in HTML.
A timeline of technology.
Improve your word power: here’s a timeline of terms used to describe male genitalia throughout history. And yes, there is a female equivalent.
I like this theory!
A little piece of JavaScript to strip out the styling from Twitter widgets.
Oh, no! How horrid! Now Twitter won’t control the “user experience” of that widget!
Instead, the person who actually posted the tweets in the first place gets to decide how they should be displayed. Crazy idea, isn’t it?