What is a timeline?

Summary/Overview

From mapping out a marketing campaign to planning a product launch, there's one easy tool that can bring it all together for you - timelines. In this guide, we’ll explain what timelines are, how they can help you stay organised, communicate clearly with your teams, and turn your plans into action. And we’ll show you how to make your own in minutes with Adobe Express.

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What is a timeline?

A timeline represents events, tasks, or other data points in a sequential, typically chronological, order. It is a visual representation, used to show how something has evolved or will unfold over time.

Timelines can be vertical or horizontal, and formatted as bars, blocks, or as text with visuals. You can also customise timelines to include exact dates, durations, or even high-level periods – making them useful for mapping out past events and future plans.

They are often used in schools, businesses, and personal life planning. But they’re also great for marketers who want to track content rollout, product releases, or brand milestones.

Editable examples for timelines.

What can a timeline be used for?

Timelines are versatile and can be used to help people visualise almost any kind of information while tracking progress over time.

Common uses of timelines include:

• Documenting a period of history, for example, timelines of the Tudors in classrooms, the Industrial Revolution in museums, or company founding dates.
• Visualising key data over a set period, for example, marketing reports, customer journeys, or analytics dashboards.
• Planning out projects, mapping tasks, milestones, and deadlines in a clear format for businesses.
• Mapping a customer or user journey to help marketers and UX teams visualise touchpoints.
• Tracking content creation or publishing schedules in editorial planning, for example, planning the timeline to schedule articles, newsletters, and social media posts.
• Showing progress or performance for reporting success in quarterly reviews or funding presentations.

Main types of timelines.

There are many ways to create a timeline of events. Here are the most common formats and how to use them.

Chronological timelines.

A chronological timeline shows events in date order. A timeline in history is often used in schools to visualise information like the birth dates of historical figures or the progress of historical eras. Chronological timelines are also perfect for brand storytelling. You can make your own chronological timeline with our timeline templates.

Project timelines.

Project timelines are usually used by businesses to show key tasks and deadlines within a campaign or business goal. They are common in marketing, product development, or event planning to help wider teams understand the planned schedule for a campaign. Create your own in minutes using our project templates.

Roadmaps.

Roadmaps are high-level timelines that show where a business or product is heading. They are often split into phases like Q1, Q2, etc., and are frequently used in stakeholder updates to visualise project progress. Roadmap templates can help companies make sense of detailed and often confusing product plans.

Gantt charts.

A Gantt chart is a detailed timeline with overlapping tasks and dependencies. This is more complicated than a standard linear timeline, and is used by project managers or teams to show their workload and resource planning. Explore ourGantt chart templates to build your own.

What to include in a timeline.

What you include in a timeline will be unique to your project or needs. It might be a business plan, a social posting schedule, or a timeline of the birth dates of the Royal Family. The format of your timelines might change, but all timelines should follow a few key design principles to make sure that they are clear and useful.

Your timeline should have a title that describes what the timeline is about, for example “2025 Product Launch Plan”. The timeline itself should be a line or a series of boxes. This is the visual structure that guides the viewer through the order of events. You can choose whatever scale fits your needs, whether that’s days, months, quarters, or years.

Once the structure of the timeline is in place, you can start adding key events, like your most important milestones, tasks, or the data points that you want to include. To help make your timeline easy to understand at a glance – and to add visual appeal – you can add supporting icons and imagery for points like meetings, launches, or celebrations.

More timeline template ideas from Adobe Express.

How to make a timeline.

Get a head start when making your timeline with Adobe Express’ Online Timeline Maker. You can choose from professionally designed templates and customise your fonts, colours, icons, and layouts to match your branding.

Adding events or milestones is simple – just drag them into place on your timeline. Once it’s ready, download your design or turn it into a presentation using the AI Presentation Maker and share it with your team.

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Useful things to know.

What is another word for timeline?

Timelines are also called roadmaps, schedules, sequences, charts, and project plans. How you refer to your timeline will depend on its context and purpose, but ‘timeline’ is an overarching phrase that can be used to describe any of the visual linear charts.

What is the most common type of timeline?

Chronological timelines are the most popular kind of timeline, especially for education settings or simple event tracking in businesses.

Why do people use timelines?

People use timelines to organise events or data visually. This makes it easier to understand, helps communicate big ideas in a simple way, and is useful for planning projects or schedules over time.

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