Get started
You're in.
Here's the quickest way to get the feel.
Fastest of all: poke at a finished one. Open the example board — Nelson Mandela's life against the century he lived through — and just move around it: zoom in, hover an event, focus a lane. Two minutes with it and the idea clicks.
Then make your own — about five minutes.
- 1 · New board. Give it a title — a person, a project, a question you're chasing. A rough date range is optional; you can set or change it any time.
- 2 · Add a lane for your subject. Mark it protagonist, and type in a handful of events. Write dates the way you'd say them —
1949,late 1973,c. 1976,2 Dec 1993— it works out the precision for you. - 3 · Drape some context. This is the part that feels like magic: add a preset lane (Presidents, Popes, Nobel laureates, the decolonization of Africa…) in a click, or import a whole life or an office straight from Wikidata. You don't hand-build the backdrop.
- 4 · Hit Compare. Everything lands on one scaled timeline. Now look for the overlaps — the things that turn out to have shared the same years.
A few things worth knowing
- Dates are forgiving. Type them naturally; the timeline shows you how precise it understood you to be, and renders the uncertainty honestly (a decade looks like a decade).
- Lanes tell themselves apart. Each gets a colour and a shape automatically — recolour any time.
- Your boards are private unless you choose to share them. Sharing is one unlisted, revocable link.
- Export anything — PNG, SVG, or the raw JSON.
Stuck, or something feels off?
Email hello@stratatouille.com — a real person reads it. We're early, and honestly the rough edges are exactly what we want to hear about. If a date won't parse, an import comes back thin, or something just feels clunky, tell us. That feedback is the whole point right now.