The Vice Provost for Academic Affairs at the Naval Postgraduate School requested this academic program timeline in 2022. The intent was to update an outdated timeline on the wall near the Registrar’s office.
However, with NPS’s complex curriculum history, this couldn’t just be a linear timeline. Each curriculum is within one of the university’s departments, which have changed and shifted over time in response to the military’s needs.
The finished product encapsulates a multi-team effort to dig up, clean, interpret, and present over 100 years of data. They did a lot of the work; my job was to make it all look good and make sense.
The original timeline
This timeline, completed in 1976, is outside the Registrar’s Office at NPS. It does a surprisingly good job of displaying the first seventy years of NPS’s history, even by today’s standards. As far as I can tell, Lt. Hall made it with a typewriter, a penknife, a straightedge, and an impressive amount of patience.
Collecting data
As we looked at the data captured in Lt. Hall’s timeline, though, we saw some discrepancies between that and the Registrar’s archives. I suspect this is because Lt. Hall was working before any sort of digital system or database like we have today. We chose to revisit the paper archives to see if any of the data or history needed reinterpreting.
Collecting, collating, organizing, and analyzing all of the data took our team months. We logged everything into an Excel spreadsheet that kept growing larger and more complex. I used color coding, conditional formatting, and in-cell text formats to keep everything straight.
Layout and design
Once we had everything prepared, I inputted the data into my design files. It felt a bit like playing a massive game of Untangle. How do I lay out the complex academic history of NPS so that it follows an intuitive path through the years? Programs paused, ended, began, changed names… the school itself changed locations a few times early in its history.
We added more context to NPS’s growth over time with a sand chart at the bottom of the timeline. This represents enrollment by type of student: Navy, Marine Corps, Army, Civilian, etc. The Institutional Research team supplied the data for this.
Missions statements took a bit more work to gather. My team reviewed graduation programs, promotional material, and general archives to assemble everything we could. Once we had a list of all the known mission statements through the years, we sorted them by date. Some changes were subtle, just a word or two, so we left those off the final set.
Color coding
Once I had all of NPS’s curricula into my design, I color-coded them by modality: resident, distance learning, or hybrid. Like many other academic institutions, NPS saw a dramatic increase in its distance learning offerings during and after the COVID-19 pandemic. However, distance learning has been a part of the NPS education strategy since the 1990s.
I selected a color palette that included NPS Blue and chose other high-contrast colors with accessibility in mind. While the military doesn’t have many colorblind personnel, NPS has a very diverse student and staff population. I wanted to ensure that as many people as possible could read and understand the timeline.
The final product
I formatted the timeline to spread across three 4′ x 6′ poster panels intended for display in the administrative building. Each panel held fifty years of the timeline, with extra room on the right-most panel for where NPS expects to take its curricula in the future. Negative space on the first two panels was intended for insets such as historical context, background information, and fun facts.
I also adapted it to work on a 4K-resolution Microsoft Surface Hub installed in the NPS library, combining the timeline’s three segments into one contiguous graphic. I left off the insets on this version and moved the mission statements to the far left.