Reading a Life in Weeks by Gina Trapani, I was surprised at how effective this base unit is, the single week, at scaffolding a biography.
The page is presented entirely as a grid, the first entry being her birthday: scanning two rows down she is 1 year old, you scroll further back now with a sense for spans of time, seeing events defining weeks, weeks arranged into rows, a few rows making up a year.
You orient yourself to the events of her life among the events of the broader world, at a scale not too brief or long-winded, a scrollbar showing the page only goes so long: seeing Gina set herself a last week, and you reach the end not long after having first clicking into the page.
This page is my use of Gina's idea with design tweaks.
Gina sets her text in the grid, the narrative coming from groupings: by where she lived, her career, her place in life.
I'm keeping with the format but aligning the grid:
to fix calendar years, I pull the text into footnotes and mark linked pages like ☰.
To avoid the problem of setting the page's end, the dates grow upward to here: most recent (marking and dating now) immediately follows.
