Speaker 1: So I'm going to put together a timeline or a production schedule for a website project that I'm working on. And I'm doing this in Illustrator, I mean of course you could use a bunch of different apps to do this and there are even specially designed apps for project management that would have timeline production tools built in. We're going to use Illustrator for graphic designers but this isn't an Illustrator tutorial so I might speed up or gloss over some of the stuff that I'm doing but I just want to get across the general concept and steps required in putting together a production schedule or a timeline so that you can build something to include in your projects or indeed plan out a project and show a client. So one of the first things that we need to do is to consider all of the breakdown of tasks in a project. So we break the big project down into smaller blocks so they're easier to handle and we give each of those smaller blocks a bit of a mini deadline in order to get the whole project, the entirety of the project done within the proposed timeline. So what I kind of do is start by listing all of those jobs that might be part of the major job and I'm just going to set some text. So I'm looking at the kind of jobs that I'll need to do, there'll be an initial client

Speaker 2: meeting, I'll just copy these out, copy out a few.

Speaker 1: So these are all of the kind of micro tasks, smaller jobs within the bigger project of creating a website for a client. So I'm going to space all of those smaller jobs out across a graphic timeline to give my client and other members of the production team a good idea of how we're going to put this together in terms of the time frame. So what I'm going to do is, we've got eight weeks to put this project together so I'm going to create a graphic that outlines that passage of time. Okay so we've got a span of eight weeks and now we can map all of our projects or mini projects to that eight weeks. Now I'm just going to create a little bit of a visual break between all of these jobs. So I've broken down all of my mini tasks and I've given them a kind of a part of my timeline and now I'm going to visually, I might just bring all of these things across to the other side of the timeline because these are sort of my titles for the job, I'm going to use a kind of a little bit of a graphic to indicate how long, how much time each of these mini

Speaker 2: tasks, how long each task will take.

Speaker 1: Alright so our initial client meeting is only going to take probably the first day of the project so a small graphic like that will suffice. Once we've been kind of briefed by the client, we've had an initial client meeting, we've maybe done some interviews with the client, we're going to undertake some project research as I've suggested there but that's going to be a bigger job so that might take us into the second week of the project and by stretching out that graphic there I can indicate visually to my client how long it's going to take so when I send this through to my client they can easily look and go oh that research component of the project is going to take around about two weeks. After some initial research we're going to write the brief and that might take us the best part of a week and we'll want to get that signed off very close to finishing that brief so that's around about a day there. So that was a pretty rushed job and maybe I've got some of the timing a little bit skew with there, I think I needed to wait a bit more time at the back end there for the website build but you'll get the idea. Breaking down all of the micro tasks in a project and then visually mapping those so that we can give our clients and our other stakeholders a road map for the project trajectory so at a glance all members of the team can identify what their tasks are and when they need to complete those.