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Aʿlām Timeline
تسلسل الأعلام بين الوقائع والأعوام
Private client · Interactive timeline · iPad
A bilingual interactive timeline tracing scholars and notable figures against the events and years they lived through, set like an illuminated book and designed to be read on an iPad, offline.
- Status
- In progress
- Platform
- iPad, offline
- Languages
- Arabic and English
- Our role
- Data structuring, visual direction, design, development
Made for a private client. The screens are blurred to protect their privacy, and the profile leaves out what is theirs to tell.
The brief
The client had years of research in a spreadsheet: hundreds of figures and events, each with its dates, places and sources. On paper the connections were hard to see; a long list cannot show who lived through what.
The brief was an interactive edition that reads like a book and moves like a map: zoom from centuries to a single year, follow a figure across the events of their life, and do it all on an iPad without a connection.
What we did
- Turned the research sheet into a clean dataset, with the dates reconciled across Hijri and Gregorian years.
- Set a visual direction drawn from manuscript tradition, with marbled paper, a title cartouche and page spreads, rather than a chart.
- Built the timeline to zoom smoothly from centuries to years, with search and filters by category.
- Made it work offline on iPad, with both languages switchable in place.
Highlights
Centuries to years
Pinch and drag through time; the level of detail changes with the zoom.
Figures against events
Each figure is placed against the events of their years, so lives and history read together.
Search and filters
Find a name, a year or a category, and see only what matters to the question at hand.
An illuminated book
Marbled paper, a title cartouche and bilingual typography set for reading, not scanning.
Where it stands
The first edition is with the client. An editing backend is planned so their team can add entries without touching the code.
Built withWeb technologies, packaged for iPadOffline-firstData from the client’s research sheet