Building online education courses within proprietary software or platforms brings up any number of design and content constraints, but when writers let designers try a more graphic approach or upend a traditional format the results can be both charming and effective. If scrolling vertically is your only option on a platform, that makes displaying what would typically be a horizontal timeline nearly impossible to share without converting it to video or finding another, complicated workaround. Add to that trying to share two timelines that are not exactly in-sync with each other, what then?

By utilizing existing platform functionality like Apex Learning's vertical 'STEPS' format I was able to build our US-Soviet Space Race timeline within a compact area of the overall page.

Each time segment could then be expanded to share relevant details. Our original manuscript's art call did not have a solution for how to display the asynchronous or missing events, but I felt it was incredibly important for us to have the top-level timeline's steps be parallel in construction and retain the ‘space’ for the missing or out-of-sync events. By building the page-level title bar elements with graphics taller than our standard text title bars I was able to share each nation’s semi-concurrent timelines together, and because the dropdown graphics were also built on top of a shared graphic background, the overall design looks unified whether the timeline's ‘step’ is open or closed. 

In a perfect world we'd have been able to go even deeper into the details: Ask critical thinking questions about the incredible, decades-long gap between US vs. Soviet womens' entries into the space race as well as go more in depth as to why the Soviet economy forced the abandonment of their race to land on the Moon. I hoped the graphic treatment within the timeline would help exemplify those gaps and fall offs visually even if state standards did not obligate the course to share those details in writing.