How a timeline begins

Not everything at Swahili Coast Studio begins beautifully.

Sometimes it begins with a pencil, a piece of squared paper and a few lines that probably make considerably more sense to the person drawing them than to anyone else.

The timeline for our Turkana Boy book began exactly like that.

The problem was simple enough: how do you show 1.6 million years on a single timeline — while still leaving enough room for the relatively tiny piece of history where East Africa, the Swahili Coast and our own time appear?

First came the sketch.
Nothing elegant. Just the basic idea: Turkana Boy at one end, our time at the other, a break in the enormous stretch between them, and some very approximate thoughts about what should happen in between.

Then came the mockup.
The pencil lines moved into Illustrator, proportions began to make sense, and a colour system was introduced to separate the historical periods.

And finally, the finished timeline.
What began as a few uncertain lines on squared paper became a reusable visual system — one that could place Turkana Boy, East African history and the modern world on the same page without pretending that 1.6 million years fit neatly on a ruler.

Which is probably a useful reminder of how design often works:

It doesn’t have to look clever at the beginning. It just has to contain the beginning of a good idea.