Being a freelance web designer and developer, I need to be able to show clients, in a simple yet informative fashion, how their project is going to play out, and what is going to be happening during any phase of the project.

Typically project managers use gantt charts to do this sort of thing within a project team, and I wanted something like a gantt chart, but simpler and more expressive.

So for a recent proposal I created a chart in Illustrator that went over really well with the client. It doesn't try to show all dependencies or tasks, it just lays out the phases of the project, showing how long (in weeks) each phase will be, and what is happening during the phase. It also shows milestones that will require a client decision.

Having done that, and being a geek, I figured I could probably automate the process. ;)

So I'm currently working with the python imaging library to create my chart from data. Shortly I'll be loading the data from an OPML file that describes the project plan (I do a lot of planning in OmniOutliner). The image in the previous post is an early chart generated by mygannt.py.

If all goes well, I might take the time to package this for release.