Corporate timeline walls are a fun, effective way to tell a company’s story. They can show you exactly how a business grew from humble origins to its current size. They sum up years of history at a glance. Which brings us to the question: just how many years should your corporate timeline wall cover? Is there a minimum? How about a maximum?
Maybe you think timeline walls are only for businesses with a long history — a hundred years or more. But they’re really not! Some of our favorite timeline walls are ones we did for businesses celebrating other milestones.
Asking whether your company has a long enough history for a corporate timeline wall isn’t quite the right question. The better question is, how much of a story do you have to tell? If you have enough material, it doesn’t matter as much how many years that material covers. For instance, we made one of our coolest timeline walls for an organization whose history was barely in the double digits.
Short History, Plenty of Story
The Great Lakes Loons baseball team had been around for only about ten years when they asked us to create a timeline wall for them. But take a look at their wall: does it look short or bare to you?
By giving each year its own panel, and including multiple photos or artifacts for each year, we were able to fill the wall easily. Uniforms, trophies, knickknacks, giant cutout photos — it’s all fair game. It makes the wall far more engaging than a simple series of panels would have been. Plus, it let us tell the Loons’ story in plenty of detail, almost like the play-by-play call of a baseball game.
So then, do you need a lot of multimedia elements before you can make a good timeline wall? It doesn’t hurt, but no, you don’t need them either. There’s a lot you can do just with photos and text.
The Minimalist Corporate Timeline Wall
For example, our clients at Saginaw Control and Engineering (SCE) asked us to create a timeline wall for their new office. They’ve been in business since the 1960s — not a short time by any means, but not the longest time either. For their company history wall, we relied on a crisp format and a cool hanging system to make things stand out.
Most of SCE’s timeline wall is filled with photos from their archives, documenting the company’s history. Since they had so many photos to work with, it didn’t matter as much how many years their corporate timeline wall covered. We simply included a few text panels that hit the highlights for each decade.
The clean edges of each panel and photo give the wall a sharp, professional look. And the system of wires we used to hang each panel makes them float above the wall, enhancing the minimalist appeal.
As you can see, there’s no real requirement for how many years a corporate timeline wall needs to cover. You just need enough of a history to tell an interesting story, and having interesting media to go with it doesn’t hurt. But as SCE’s wall shows, you don’t even have to go all-out with artifacts (like the Loons did) to have an engaging timeline wall.
