PVSR ’25 had more respondents, more historical context and more difficult stories than any edition before it. We were talking about debt, financial anxiety, unstable income, emergency funds and the everyday pressure of making money stretch in Nigeria.

That made the design problem less about displaying data and more about holding attention. The report needed enough clarity to make a huge amount of information understandable, and enough visual expression to keep people moving through it without turning serious findings into entertainment.

The numbers mattered because there were people inside them. So instead of designing a dashboard or digitising a PDF, we treated PVSR ’25 as an editorial experience with chapters, rhythm, moments of emphasis, human voices and different visual languages for different kinds of data.

You should be able to skim it, study it, stop at a finding that feels uncomfortably familiar, or lose twenty minutes wondering how everybody else is surviving this economy.

Six subjects formed the spine of the report: income, spending, savings, emergency funds, debt and financial satisfaction.

The challenge was giving each chapter a clear rhythm without making every finding feel equally important. Stronger insights got more space, supporting data stayed quieter, and the structure gave people obvious places to pause, skim or keep going.

The Savings Report sits somewhere between research, editorial publishing and Nigerian internet culture. PVSR ’25 needed to feel credible enough to carry serious data, but expressive enough that reading it never felt like work.

Collage, bold typography, illustration, photography and an intentionally varied layout gave the report energy between dense stretches of information. The system could be loud when the story allowed it, then get out of the way when the numbers needed to land.

With this much data, defaulting to the same graphs and charts over and over would have made the report feel repetitive very quickly.

So we treated data visualisation as a broader visual language. Sometimes the clearest answer was a chart. Other times it was scale, typography, repetition, composition, illustration or visual metaphor — choosing the form that best expressed the insight rather than the most familiar way to plot it.

Data could tell us that nearly seven in ten Nigerians rely on a single income source. A person could tell us what that actually feels like.

So the experience regularly breaks away from charts and percentages to let respondents and experts speak for themselves. Those pauses stop the report from reducing 26,000 lives to an infographic.