Timeline designer Nicholas Felton leaves Facebook as Home for Android launches

Two years after joining Facebook, designer Nicholas Felton is leaving the company. In a Facebook post yesterday, Felton said he was “extremely proud of the projects I worked on” and called his time at Facebook a high point in his career, but that he would be “moving on” and returning to New York. Felton is best known for working on the Facebook Timeline, a major overhaul that gave profile pages a new look and a new way of organizing information. He leaves just as Facebook introduces another new tool: Home, an Android launcher that makes Facebook posts and messaging central to a phone’s user interface.

Felton’s plans for the moment are unknown, but he has a long pre-Facebook history. His widely read Personal Annual Reports, a chart from which is shown above, collect details captured by relentless lifelogging, creating a revealing portrait of himself. Those reports would later be credited as an influence on Timeline. He’s also seen his brand of life-tracking and analytics become more popular; last year, he described his desire to put his data in context now that “half my friends are wearing FitBits.”