This is the project that spawned my CSS mini timeline adventure (which I ended up not using, actually). It’s a really simple proof of concept for analyzing family relationships:
You enter basic information for the family and on the fly it draws a timeline and shows you how old each person was when other major family events happened (siblings born, deaths, etc.). Super simple. It’s mostly so you can get a better feel for what all the dates actually mean — you can see that so-and-so was only 16 when her mother died, or that there’s a gap where a child could have been born, etc.
Also, this is just a proof of concept — I’m not completely satisfied with the design, and the print stylesheet needs more work (but yes, there’s a print stylesheet), and there are plenty of issues left to resolve (some of which are on the GitHub issues page for the project) — but you get the idea.
Something like this would be more useful when hooked up with a data store (like FamilySearch, for example, which wouldn’t be very hard to do). Then you wouldn’t have to type everything in.
I wanted to add small timelines to a little web-based genealogy proof-of-concept I’m working on, and I realized that it’d be pretty easy to make the tick marks using CSS box-shadows. And it was.
There are some caveats (if you change the background color, you have to edit the CSS to match — you can’t use an rgba color with an opacity of 0 because then the tick marks fill the whole space), but overall it works well.
The other day I was looking through one of the directories on my computer and found a web-based family descendancy chart redesign that I forgot to post about. It’s a work in progress, but you can take a look at the live demo, which looks like this:
I take a lot of things for granted. Take the sun, for instance. It’s 93 million miles away. Ninety-three million miles. Let’s say you hop in a car and start driving towards the sun at 60 mph (okay, we’ll make it a spacecar) — it’d take you 177 years to get there. And that’s if there aren’t any red lights along the way. So the sun is far, but the thing that blows my mind is this: it’s so bright to us here on earth that if we look straight at it, it temporarily blinds us. And it’s hot. You can burn ants with it (and a magnifying glass). That’s crazy. I mean, I understand the physics of it (the basics, anyway), but isn’t it bonkers that the whole thing actually works? Not to mention its huge role in life on earth and all of that.
Speaking of distance, instant messaging is another thing that’s crazy if you stop to think about it. I can type “lol” on my laptop and have it show up pretty much instantly for someone on the other side of the globe. Which is almost 13,000 miles away. Not as far away as the sun, but still pretty dang far. It’s like magic, except better because, like, it actually works.
There’s more. The stuff we build amazes me. Like cities. And buildings — cathedrals, skyscrapers, football stadiums, airports. Even just ordinary houses are incredible (meaning, hard to believe). The fact that we can stick pieces of wood together into something that (a) stands upright and (b) doesn’t blow down with the wind just blows my mind.
Don’t get me wrong, I love animals (or at least I don’t hate them), but you don’t see anything like this in the animal kingdom. Sure, lots of species do some crazy intricate things, but nothing even comes close to what we humans build. Our cities are far more complex than any anthill.
And there’s things like plastics. We can mold plastic into almost any shape we want, which is why my shampoo bottle looks the way it does. And shampoo is amazing, too. To think that we somehow came up with the right types of things to mix together to make our hair (a) clean and (b) smell good (plus the other stuff shampoo does, most of which is beyond me) is a miracle.
And we have zippers and post-it notes and medicines that work (usually) and violins and pianos that actually sound beautiful and microwaves and street lights and the whole earth is chock-full of little miracles.
Street lights remind me of something else that blows my mind: freeways. Streets in general, but freeways in particular. First, you have this crazy massive network of I don’t know how many millions of tons of asphalt laid all over the country (and world, but we’ll stick with the States for this paragraph), flattened out and relatively smooth. They’ve put roads through mountains and (with the help of bridges, which are also incredible) over bays and rivers and lakes. Second, and this is the bigger miracle for me, we have millions of imperfect humans driving at fairly high speeds in all sizes of vehicles on these freeways…and yet accidents are relatively rare. Consider all it takes for an accident to happen: someone’s attention leaves the road for four or five seconds. Or someone accidentally turns their steering wheel a few millimeters too far. It’s an insane miracle that there aren’t a lot more accidents on every road we’ve got. Which is why I believe in traffic angels.
And, actually, all of these miracles are a testimony to me that God loves us, because even as awesome as we are (being the children of God with all sorts of latent superpowers) (no, really), there’s no way we could have gotten as far as we have without his help. Without God inspiring all of these makers and builders and inventors, we’d still be living in caves. (Well, maybe not caves, but you get the point.) At least we’d still have that bright, hot, oh-so-far-away sun.
Traditional family group records (at least the ones I’m used to) are usually a little ugly, but man, they don’t have to be. Here are a couple of redesigns I’ve been playing around with (and you can click on the screenshots to get a full PDF of each).
Original
I should add that they normally don’t look quite this bad — this happens to be printed from the new FamilySearch website, and the print stylesheets need a bit of work. But this is the general layout of traditional family group records.
Too many lines. And lots of wasted space on information that isn’t present. (If you intend to fill it out as a form later, however, then it’s a good thing. For the purposes of this redesign, I’m assuming you’re doing your data entry on the computer.)
Also, the visual hierarchy is essentially flat, making it hard to see the names of the people involved.
Version A
At a glance, you can tell which family the record is for. This is handy when you’ve got a lot of family group records.
The layout’s a little more compact. (If a family has lots of kids, I’m thinking the second page would drop the parent sidebar and go full-width, kind of like in Version B.)
For the parents’ parents, I’m including a lifespan to help place things in context (see John Crowder).
I’m using “born” and “died” instead of “birth” and “death” since they’re shorter.
The LDS ordinances are a lot more compact. (And for people who aren’t LDS, it’d be really easy to remove them from the layout.)
I’m still not very happy with the placement of the gender designation on the children.
The footer is home to some “family stats,” interesting tidbits on the family that aren’t immediately visible from the absolute dates.
Version B
The parents are now side-by-side on the top. This layout emphasizes the vertical hierarchy of the family, for what that’s worth.
There’s more space for each child’s information. I’m not sure that space is necessary, though. Hard to say.
Conclusion
I see these as initial explorations into the area of family group record design — there’s still a lot of work to be done, and I’ve got lots of other ideas for ways to visualize family history data.
Issue 16 of Mormon Artist is now up. This issue features interviews with Tessa Meyer Santiago, Marilyn Bushman-Carlton, Megan Rieker, Elisabeth Bell, Leslie Graff, Sara Webb, and Marilyn McPhie.
And so it ends. (My involvement, anyway.) As you’ll see in the editors’ notes, Katherine Morris is now editor-in-chief and publisher of the magazine, effective immediately. Over the next couple weeks I’ll be migrating the website to her server and handing over the other keys of the kingdom, and she’ll be getting the first few episodes of the new podcast out soon. And it’ll be good.
Today’s release: Ἰλιάς, an EPUB/Kindle edition of Homer’s Iliad in ancient Greek (as part of my Originals series). The EPUB edition looks better than the Kindle edition, at least in iBooks and Digital Editions, but the Kindle edition is pretty usable as well. Enjoy.
