Steve Jobs over the years

This past week, a major corporation and the technology world as we know it lost an icon.

Steve Jobs, Co-founder and former CEO of Apple, Inc., who has introduced many of the gadgets that have become a mainstay in society today, passed away at age 56 after succumbing to pancreatic cancer.

In a tribute to the passing of the Apple Chairman, The Economist published an article yesterday entitled, “Steve Jobs: A Genius Departs.”

Within the article, the magazine included a time-line of Jobs’ many accomplishments from his co-founding of Apple in 1976, to his resignation from Apple’s CEO position in August of this year.

This time-line did, in fact, enhance the article’s credibility as it added a valuable visual element to the already detailed text portion it contained.

The article spent a lot of time discussing Jobs’ many different accomplishments, and innovations he brought to the technology world during his career in the business.

It included great detail to go along with each accomplishment in order to educate the reader about just the type of man Jobs’ was, and how valuable he had been to our society’s technological revolution.

With the inclusion of the timeline in the article, it allows the reader to take a break from the long, detailed text, and lets them see all of his accomplishments listed, by date, in one simple chart.

This makes it easier for people to read the article (as it basically bullet points a good portion of it), and it allows the reader a visual representation that helps them to better understand Jobs’ progression through his life and career, and his influence over the current state of the global technology world.

Steve Jobs was an innovator, and through the use of this timeline in The Economist‘s tribute article to him, now everybody can see just how innovative he really was.