GE
Tracing the history of
an industrial giant’s
commitment to innovation

General Electric (GE) has been in the technological vanguard since its co-founder Thomas Edison created the first lightbulb. The company has had an immeasurable effect on everything from power grids to airplane and jet design to consumer electronics to medicine to renewable energy to space exploration.

We created a highly modular interactive timeline that let users explore GE’s history of innovation across multiple industries and fields. The rich visual experience is just as dynamic and impactful on mobile devices as it is on browsers.

After a recent reorganization, the company wanted to create a visually engaging interactive timeline that would reinforce the scope and the impact of its longstanding commitment to innovation. GE gave GDP the opportunity to tell the story of the company’s history of innovation. We were to research, design, and implement an interactive timeline that would present a potentially overwhelming amount of information in a clear, organized, highly readable, and easily updatable way.

Users exploring the GE timeline could choose their own throughlines to follow the chronology of the company’s impact on various fields.

We dug into the history of the company, structuring and prioritizing its achievements in a way that tells a coherent story about GE’s importance to an array of industries, and teases out overlaps between its various endeavors. After familiarizing ourselves with its tech stack and site integration process, we delivered a standalone website that housed a landing page and various industry timelines and narrative pages.

The pages are data-driven, and the content can easily be updated. Each industry, narrative, and individual time point has a unique URL. We’re proud that the timeline successfully manages to convey the staggering impact that GE has had on our world in a format that is clean, coherent, fun to explore, and easy to share.