Interactive timeline for the European Union

There are 28 countries in the European Union (EU) but there will be 27 soon. You probably heard about Brexit – United Kingdom decided to leave the EU. This was still a hot topic while I was browsing list of e-learning challenges so I decided to catch up with interactive timelines topic as EU has an interesting story to show.

My idea was very simple – just to show the dates and countries which joined EU at that time. There were 8 EU enlargements since 1958, so my timeline (which was a flag mast) had to have 8 milestones to present.

(click image to launch interaction)

For the information transparency I kept the date tags colour (points on the timeline) consistent with the countries joining that year - so if a date was typed in red a set of red countries had to appear. All I needed was an editable version of Europe’s map and I found a nice one here. Every country was a separate object so it was easy to colour and group them the way I wanted.

When all the countries were coloured in Illustrator I exported them as different assets and inserted to Storyline with hidden as initial state.

So when a date tag is clicked it triggers two actions:

• an image of countries changes its state to normal (all these image are placed on a main slide)

• a list of new members joining appears (they all sit on different layers).

Now you have a chance to check how the EU expanded.

As always I’m looking forward to your comments.