Data Experience Design
VizStats is a premium boutique studio. We turn dense, high-stakes data — geopolitics, supply chains, climate, security — into interactive investigations, intelligence platforms, and visual stories built for the people who need them most.
For international newsrooms, research institutions, and NGOs across the US, UK, Europe, Africa, and Southeast Asia.
A multi-year partnership with a leading independent research and media organization — editorial investigations, research databases, commodity trackers, and a geopolitical atlas. Genuinely different problems, one studio. Every product is public and independently verifiable — four live, three in active development.
A long-form scrollytelling investigation into how Chinese state-backed and hybrid enterprises came to dominate Africa's critical minerals supply chain — built to be read as a story and interrogated as a dataset.
Chinese mining in Africa, resolved to the project level and made searchable.
Tracing where African cobalt and copper actually go
Africa isn't waiting for the electric car. It's redesigning it.
Three decades of Chinese security engagement in Africa, mapped in one place
A newsroom for the climate story Africa keeps having to explain itself
Indonesia mines the metal that powers the energy transition. This toolkit hands its journalists the questions no one is asking.
Seven products. One partnership. Editorial investigations, research databases, commodity trackers, and a geopolitical atlas — genuinely different problems, one studio.
Anchor client
Our anchor client is an independent, non-partisan research and media organization tracking China's footprint across the developing world. What began as a single project became a multi-year, multi-platform partnership. VizStats functions as the organization's primary digital product studio — seven products, and counting.
Shipped for one anchor client — 4 live, 3 in active development.
Across Africa and Southeast Asia, from the DRC to Indonesia.
The China–Africa Security Atlas — 12 themes, spanning 1991–2026.
English and Bahasa Indonesia — reimagined for context, not translated.
Each is a genuinely different design and technical problem. Name the discipline first — the production system activates around it.
Data journalism, fully realized.
Long-form interactive investigations that fuse narrative with rich visualization. Scroll-driven, built to serve the generalist reader and the specialist analyst at once.
Complex data, built to explore.
Single-purpose products that give an audience direct, hands-on access to a dataset. Trackers, trade-flow maps, production monitors, comparative explorers.
Research infrastructure for serious institutions.
Structured, searchable platforms for sustained, high-frequency professional use. Research databases, geopolitical atlases, sector trackers — many users served without flattening the differences between them.
Data stories that move.
Broadcast-quality motion for explainers, social campaigns, and kinetic data sequences, optimized for digital distribution.
Data made visible, everywhere it's read.
Standalone visualization for print, digital, and web — single editorial graphics, full report suites, thematic maps, embeddable charts.
Added only when the work calls for it — never as an upsell: CMS Integration · Interactive 3D · AI Integration.
Phase 00 — Discovery & Strategy is embedded in every project and never skipped. From there, production phases activate around the specific discipline and the specific problem — not a template.
Data audit, audience research, narrative framing, and information-architecture planning — delivered as a fully documented creative brief. Universal to every engagement.
Sourcing, structuring, and interrogating the dataset until it is trustworthy enough to build on — the foundation everything downstream depends on.
Turning the brief into a system: narrative flow, interaction model, and a visual language matched to the gravity of the subject.
Engineering the product — scrollytelling, live maps, searchable platforms — to hold up for a generalist reader and a specialist analyst alike.
Shipping, then staying with the work as it grows. Most engagements become long-running partnerships rather than one-time deliverables.
Most data is either locked away from the people who need it or flattened into charts nobody reads. VizStats exists to close that gap — to turn complex, high-stakes research into digital products diverse audiences can actually use.
We began as a freelance practice and grew, through the work itself, into a boutique agency. Today we serve investigative newsrooms, research institutions, policy organizations, and NGOs — the organizations for whom getting the data right is not optional.
We work with a small number of organizations each year and stay with the work as it grows.
Geopolitics, supply chains, security, climate, indigenous land rights — we understand the material, not just the brief.
Based in Port Harcourt, Nigeria; delivering to US, UK, European, African, and Southeast Asian audiences. Geography has never been the constraint.
We are not a volume studio, a generalist agency, or a dashboards-on-demand vendor.
We work with a limited number of organizations each year — the ones treating their data as evidence, not decoration. Every engagement is a partnership, built to last beyond a single deliverable.
We take on a limited number of engagements each year. If you're working on something complex, high-stakes, and worth doing properly, we'd like to hear about it.
What began as a single project became a multi-year, multi-platform partnership. VizStats functions as the organization's primary digital product studio — seven products, and counting.
Prefer email?
ubachi@vizstats.comSTEP 01 / 04