How to Create a Project Timeline for Your Art Projects
- Adilla
- 4 days ago
- 6 min read
Table of Contents
What Is A Project Timeline?
A project timeline is a visual representation of a project’s schedule and tasks; a roadmap for your team while working on any project. It helps managers, teams and even artists. Typically, creatives and fellow artists struggle with scheduling and managing deadlines for creative works. Art projects thrive better with freedom, but without a bit of artist project management, motivation, and accountability might go away.
Why Do Project Timelines Matter?
Other than assisting creative project managers to lead effectively, creatives and artists should take advantage of a project timeline when doing art projects to help prioritise tasks and direct them on what they should do on a day-to-day basis, among other things.
Allocating your time and energy is also made easier if you know what to anticipate in the upcoming weeks. Plus, once you reach the end of the project, the sense of fulfilment and success is a good boost to motivate you to keep going with your creative work.
Step By Step on Creating a Project Timeline for Art Projects
1. Create A Project Brief with Objectives and Goals
When creating a project timeline, start with the purpose, goals, milestones and vision of the overall project. Here are some questions you can ask yourself when planning:
· What are your goals in doing this art project?
· If you’re working with other creatives or artists, what are their roles?
· Is there a specific timeframe for the art project? An event you must display it for?
· What are the tasks you need to do? The scope of the project that needs to be done?
· Is there a milestone you would like to achieve?
Once you have answered these questions, you have what is essentially the outline of the project timeline.
2. Break Down the Tasks and Estimate the Time (Add in Buffer!)
When you know what you want from your project, you can then list down the tasks that need to be done to achieve the goal. Don’t worry about the chronological order of the tasks yet. It’s best to list the larger tasks first, then break them down into smaller achievable tasks so you can make a detailed and realistic schedule for your project.
List down your tasks with an estimated timeframe. Be gracious to yourself, but do not take too much time or set a short deadline. Since art projects are unpredictable and challenges tend to appear mid-project, it’s best to add a sort of buffer time in between your deadlines as a safety net for you without jeopardising the project’s overall deadline.
3. Allocate Resources
Resources could include funds, equipment and team members if you are working on a group art project. Setting this early in the planning will help keep you and your team’s workload balanced and prevent under-resourcing or over-resourcing your tasks.
4. Review And Adjust the Timeline
With the chaotic nature of art projects and the overall creative process, expect that the project might not go as planned. Some parts might need to be adjusted as the project progresses. Take the time to schedule updates to be added to your project timeline when a task is finished or changes need to be made. Keeping your timeline up-to-date reduces any misinformation or undue stress when doing your project.
5. Use Project Timeline Tools
Once everything is written down, take advantage of project management tools. You may think you won’t need one, but you’ll be surprised how much more organised your project would be if you had one tool that housed all the information of your project without needing to switch or scramble through your notes.
Tools to Help You Stay on Track
Before choosing a project management software to use for your art project, consider these tools in the software.
Visual Overview of The Timeline
Like any creatives or artists, having a visual overview of your project timeline is not only visually pleasing, but you are also less likely to be overwhelmed by the list of tasks and deadlines when it is laid out like a calendar.
Task Tracking
This is a must-have feature for project management software. Having one stop place that stores and lists out all of your tasks eliminates the hassle of manually checking them or if a task has been fulfilled or not.
Real-Time Collaboration
Software that has live updates and collaboration with your fellow creatives and artists helps to keep everyone coordinated and up to date without needing to ping them in a separate communication channel. This would be essential if any of your team are away from the studio or are working remotely.
These features are all available in our artist project management software, TESSR. One of our main modules is the TESSR Woohoo, where you can track your project’s progress and plan, and balance out your team’s workload in a visual overview. Besides that, the TESSR Review enables creative teams to have a visual collaboration. This means that you can upload and review videos and images, and add comments and annotations for feedback without switching software.
Example of a Simple Project Timeline
There are several examples out there on creating your own project timeline for art projects. Here is a list of what you can start out with:
Chronological Project Timeline
If your art project is a bit more on the simpler side, it could benefit from this type of timeline. They are suited for a more linear project to show you a simple start-to-finish timeline of your project
Vertical Chart Project Timeline
As its name suggests, it shows a vertical axis of the progress of your project. This timeline helps in resource and time allocation for tasks suited for projects that are limited in those areas.
Milestone Chart Project Timeline
If milestones are an essential part of your project, you could use them as the main way to track its progress. This timeline can help identify potential roadblocks.
Flowchart Project Timeline
This helps in determining whether each task or step in the project is interconnected to show its flow visually. Usually, this timeline is used to map out the flow of your tasks.
Conclusion
Knowing how to plan art projects will not only prevent misinformation or miscommunication with your team, but it could also prevent any missed tasks or going past the deadline that could jeopardise your art project.
FAQs (Frequently Asked Questions)
Is Creative Project Timeline the same as Project Timeline?
While similar in its traits, a creative project timeline would be more flexible to fit the demands of art and creative projects.
Is there project management software for creatives?
There are not a lot of project management tools made for creatives, but TESSR is a creative project management software made for creative projects. If you are interested in trying it out, book a demo with us!
Would it be better to hire a project manager to help manage my projects?
There is no problem in externally hiring an expert to help manage your projects; it would be better to manage your own, as you would know the ins and outs of your project. This will prevent the hassle of needing to explain what your project is and its objectives.
Author Bio
With a background in Arts English, Adilla has been a casual writer for various hobbies, including parodies of animated shows and plots for board games like Dungeons & Dragons. She loves to read anything and everything from fantasy stories to articles on tips and tricks. Currently, Adilla resides in Malaysia and is a creative writer at TESSR. One day, she is eager to publish her book. To know more about her, check out her LinkedIn.
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