Headlines
Built at the world's shortest hackathon in July 2025, this personal timeline generator weaves together individual milestones with the stories shaping the world at that moment. Enter a birthday, and the application finds real newspaper headlines from that exact day and subsequent milestone ages (5, 10, 16, 18, 21). An AI then generates poetic "connections" between the personal and the historical. Each headline links directly to the original New York Times article.
The premise: every life unfolds alongside history. A first breath coincides with a political scandal, a decade of growth runs parallel to technological shifts, coming of age happens while water crises and social movements unfold elsewhere. This tool makes those synchronicities visible.
My contribution
Design
Development
The team
2 Designers
Try it out !
Visit this link to try it out for. Link: https://birthday-headlines.vercel.app/
The Generated timeline with hyperlinked articles
How it works
The system draws from an archive of New York Times headlines spanning decades. When a user enters their birthdate, a matching algorithm finds headlines published on or near each milestone date. For each milestone, Llama 3.1 receives the headline and the age context, returning a lyrical phrase that bridges the two. The timeline renders as an animated vertical scroll with alternating milestone cards, each linking to the original article.
