Belarussian translation of this blog post can be found here. Thanks to Patricia Clausnitzer for her awesome translation!!!
Hi people,
it was some time since I half-heartedly offered to create a mockup for the Mozilla.org timeline page, something, which was long-desired. I was, until this stage, undergoing major struggle and can feel that I’m not completely over it 
But here it is: My first draft of a new timeline page. I tried to fit the design to the Mozilla colors and to make it smooth, however, there are still some parts that needs to be improved. But, we’ll see
The original timeline can be found here: http://www.mozilla.org/about/timeline.html
My mockups can be found here and here.
This is not yet complete (of course) and there are still some things to improve:
- I have to say that I need to improve the parchment background which does not look very healthy
- I need to add the Major Software releases to the timeline page
A note to my decisions:
I used the Mozilla star, as a star is often associated with “Hall of fame”, “heaven” and “highlights”, the Mozilla history is kind of both
I used the old parchment, because you could imagine a person from the future finding this old parchment and thinking about how it all began with Mozilla.
Anyway, I’m waiting for your feedback / criticism! Just add comments to this blog post.
Thanks in advance,
Tobbi!
What about accessibility on that page?
And I guess it’d be nice to be able to search for an event, like, when did Firefox 2 come out?
Looks cute! I do think the dropshadow is too subtle an effect to mark the current star with. Also, stars may need a “visited” state too.
Need to add the date of mozilla changing text-align center behaviour to not work on block-level elements in gecko, causing many standards based web devs to pull their hair out. I believe it was 1998 or 1999.
How putting the nice graphic vertically next to the original timeline. That way it is easy to read the items because they are still all readable. Hiding the content behind mouse movements is not very user friendly.
You could still have a nice graphic that reacts to mouse movements, but keep all text visible at all times (screen space permitting)
Hi Tobbi,
I think the timeline would definitely be improved with some graphical love. But that will inevitably involve some simplification, so the question is: what do you leave out? My issue with your design is that you’ve left out, at least on the initial look, what actually happened. Which is quite important for a timeline! It’s not very usable if, to read the timeline, you have to just mouseover the stars one by one.
Have you considered ways to do a graphical timeline but keep (some of) the text?
Gerv
The Mozilla Star was reduced in usage because of the negative associations that imagery brings with it (communistic regimes and the like) so I would encourage you to consider carefully whether it is appropriate to use.
Thanks for posting those mockups. Looking forward to see how this evolves. It could be useful to see how this would look in the http://www.mozilla.org design.