About
Most biographies line events up by calendar year. This changes one thing: the axis is age. Everyone’s year zero sits on the same vertical line, so “how old was he then” stops being arithmetic and becomes a distance you can measure with your eye.
What the swap removes is a bias. Textbooks and news tell stories by year, which makes “same era” feel like a relationship and “same age” feel like nothing — yet the second one is the one you can feel from the inside. A man decides to change careers at 27; a girl is already on the professional circuit at 14. Far apart on a calendar, adjacent on an age axis.
The other mode aligns by calendar year and asks a different question: in one particular year, where was each of them in their own life? On this year’s line the living all land in the same place — today is the same day for everyone.
Inspirations
- Who Lived When
Lifespans packed side by side with the names inside the bars. “A distribution is only readable in one screenful” is learned from here. - History Timeline · Yuri Bogdanov
Nine thousand people on one screen. It makes the case that density is readable — as long as the reader never has to scroll. - Your Life in Weeks · Tim Urban
A life as 4,680 boxes. The punch is not precision, it is that a life is countable — the weeks view here comes entirely from this. - Every Noise at Once · Glenn McDonald
Six thousand genres laid out at once. Proof that spreading a whole field across one page can be the work itself, not only a tool for something else.