Custom charts in action

For the Manager Magazin, a German business magazine, I built an interactive visualization of 25 years of its list of Germany’s richest people, where readers can search, explore single ranks and follow people and families across decades.

I handled the entire project, from concept and data preparation to design, development and testing.

The yearly lists were built over 25 years, and entries were recorded differently along the way. A family can appear as a group in one year and as individual members in the next. I cleaned and standardized the data and built a four-stage matching pipeline that links entries step by step, from exact and normalized names to shared companies and fuzzy matching.

To combine the algorithm with the editors’ knowledge of these families, I created a custom internal tool for reviewing, correcting and adding matches.

With the data in place, I developed the concept on real data, for mobile and desktop, and refined it in feedback rounds with the team. I then designed the details, from the color scale to dark mode and hints for the interaction, and coded the archive.

On the phone, a stepper for rank and year keeps the grid easy to explore on a small screen.