Love your site. I was a book designer about a dozen years ago. You should check with your editor. They can contact the designer or the art director who can design it so it meshes with the book’s layout. The tricky part will be laying out the text in a time period (like now) where there is a lot of activity.

Yogert909: “And don’t go looking for designers on corners, they are extremely busy this time of the year unless they’re no good. You need a pro.” Dude—there are plenty of good “pro” designers looking for work right now, just as there are plenty of employed “hacks” whose companies haven’t laid off people.

Would do it for free – no acknowledgement necessary. I appreciate your blog and value your time. If you do it (not needed in a book), then make it easy. Example:

http://piehllc.blogspot.com/

Simple and fits easily into a 4 x 1 in text box. Options include lists by decade, using the magnifier over the event, showing each event relationally with size of bailout, adding a “+” or “-” and amount for positive contribution to government or negative contribution to government (taxpayers). No real end to what is possible – kind of up to you.

I like the idea.

Unfortunately, you will have trouble putting all the text over the top of the date line. You could put only the date for each bailout. That would let you fit them all in pretty neatly as you could stagger the dates on two or three lines with a vertical line going down to the timeline. You could have a page at the beginning and the end that enumerates each of the bailouts using text descriptions for those that want the complete picture.

Likewise, each chapter would have full text descriptions for the bailouts of that chapter.

The method would allow a reader to quickly find the chapters corresponding with a particular date by flipping through the book as the text descriptions would move progressively closer and closer to the desired date as the pages moved closer to the chapter.

- Curtis

http://www.tjctv.com/Uploads/ritholtz/

http://i35.tinypic.com/214uyvm.jpg

Animated timeline / sparkline:

y-axis could give some other information (stock index number?) Don’t think size of blip could represent $ amount of bailout (unless you go log?) I’m assuming there will be scaling issues for “the year of the bailout” that could be indicated in a more obvious way (other than text as I had there).

Just curious — why is LEH on your bailout chart? They’re dead because they didn’t get a bailout, right?

1) Staggered titles, similar to staggered totals in a computer report that has numbers that are too long to all print on one line

2) Don’t try to put it all on one line. Break the time line into logical units and provide more detail on each time line. Finish with one comprehensive time line that onlt includes the main points from the detail time lines. Maybe include a little of the before and after so that you illustrate continuity … I strongly doubt all crashes stand alone. Threads from each follow through into the subsequent one(s). There is no such thing as ‘original stupidity’. A really good ‘bad idea’ never completely goes away.

3) Experiment with vertical time lines. Then you have the page length to work with if you can figure out how to do it.

4) Use the three dots to jump over points nonessential to the current topic.

5) Remember, people will buy into anything you do if it is easy to read and understand. Invent a new concept. I do it all the time. It’s not that hard. As a famous explorer once said ‘Change The Rules’.