Evolution Timeline

Role: flash, html, javascript

Ico design approached us to help build a 3D timeline illustrating the large timescales involved in human evolution. In addition the interactive needed to have dynamic content and be able to run in Arabic, a right-to-left language.

The 3D illusion is handled by some fairly simple maths, the pleasing thing is the gaps between the markers and all the period colours are in proportion (though we do speed up the animation in certain places) so it gives an accurate picture of just how recent human evolution is when compared to other events on the timeline. The original interactive was built in flash, but since that launched we’ve recoded it to work using javascript and canvas, surprisingly the performance is almost as good as the original.

View html version