Interactive: The 100 richest people in Finland

November is the big gossip fest in Finland. Every year in the beginning of the month the tax records from last year are published. In other words: you get to know who made the most money.

Every year the Finnish media outlets do a very conventional presentation of this material. Page after page of lists of top-earners. Rarely does anyone do anything more creative with the data.

I gave it a shot. This is what came out:

Open the interactive visualization in new window.

How?

This is my first visualization in Raphael.js. Previously I have been working with D3 and Protovis, but the weak browser support of these two libraries is becoming a growing concern. Especially when one tries to do sell the work. However, I have found Raphael to be very useful and somehow more intuitive than D3.

The idea for this presentation came from the super-visualization, The Sexperience, by British Channel 4, a survey about the sex life of ordinary Brits (don’t worry, you can open it at work as well). I think the geniality behind this setup is that you can follow the respondents in the quiz from question to question, which gives the user the possibility to explore the relation between different questions instead of just looking at one question at a time. What are for example the sexual preferences of the people who lost their virginity late?

To some extent my presentation of the 100 top earners let you do the same thing. You can select the persons you are interested in and follow them through the presentation. This is a potential of the modern web that I think we will see much more of in the future.