Timeline Happy Hour with OPA


Fat Pencil Studio had the pleasure this month of hosting a quarterly meeting of the Oregon Paralegal Association. In many cases we work closely with paralegals, and we enjoyed the opportunity to spend a few hours together and share over drinks about our work process, both design and legal.

The meeting started with a CLE training: Joshua spoke to the group about the ways in which Fat Pencil approaches a new timeline project. Often a necessary and essential demonstrative for a legal case, timelines are also an excellent tool for processing information. They can help pull key narratives and themes from an otherwise opaque or inscrutable data set.

Joshua encouraged the all assembled to look at timelines through the following lenses:

CONTEXT Place the data set in space. This could mean a map of cross-country moves over time, or a map of injuries to a human body over time.

CATEGORIES Group the data based who, what, where, or some other category that makes sense for the case.

CLUSTERS Look for patterns and periods of information density. For clarity, you might need to zoom in on those periods in the story of the case when a lot is going on.

Joshua also wrote more expansively on the subject of timelines back in 2015.

The presentation was followed by a short group exercise in timeline design. Each group was given a list of events, the actual sequence from a previous Fat Pencil project, and tasked with teasing out the story. Half an hour of intense debate later, each group presented their takeaways and defended themselves against some good-spirited razzing.

Thank you to everyone who joined us, we had a blast!

Jannine Hanczarek was a Designer at Fat Pencil Studio from 2017-2020.