Beyond the Spreadsheet

A public budget is among the most consequential documents a government writes, and yet among the least read. The daily life inside it, the hospital shift, the school lunch, the rent paid on time, the bus that arrives, stays folded into the cells. Few of us ever open the file.

Out of the spreadsheet

When the Generalitat de Catalunya asked us to present its 2026 budget to the public, the brief asked for something clear and human. The harder question lay underneath it: how do you invite people into information structured for administrative precision rather than public exploration? We kept coming back to the language itself. In Catalan, “posar sobre la taula”, to put something on the table, means to open it up for everyone present to see, discuss and question.

Around that idea, the campaign gathers a film with a voice-over, an interactive site at pressupostos2026.cat, double pages and robapàgines for the press, digital billboards for the street, and pieces for social media.

The film

A sixty seconds of a voice speaking directly to the viewer. When we talk about budgets, it begins, you probably imagine a table like this one, rows and columns of numbers that are hard to read. Behind those numbers, it answers, are thousands of opportunities to improve daily life, and it turns to the real tables where people sit to make decisions: to care for someone, to begin a new stage, to connect the territory, to share ideas and knowledge, to decide the future of Catalonia. The total arrives spoken in full: forty-nine thousand one hundred and sixty-two million euros. It ends with the invitation. The table is set. Come, sit. Only then does the campaign line appear in writing, pointing to the web.

A table you can scroll

The website opens with two questions. Where do you live, and which subject do you want to look at first: health, education, housing, mobility, social rights or security. Answer them, or skip them, and you arrive at your own stretch of the table.

What follows is one long table, set and waiting. Each policy area lays its own tablecloth, and on the cloth sit ordinary objects that do the counting: one plaster for every hundred new health professionals, one transport card for 275 million trips, keys, forks, buildings, a bicycle bell. Touch an object and its figure opens up: 5,993.8 million euros for hospital care, 589.3 million for mental health, 157 works across the health regions, more than two million people with access to dental care.

Set in ink and light

The table also leaves the screen. It stretches across double pages in the press, folds into robapàgines beside the day's news, lights up on digital panels in the street and slips between posts in the feed. The formats change; the figures hold still. A budget line met over breakfast reads differently from one met in a technical annex. That difference is the campaign.

The budget table, in numbers.

The Generalitat’s 2026 budget grows by 22.8%, reaching €49,162 million. Health takes the largest place at the table, with €13,800 million — 28.1% of the Generalitat’s total 2026 budget, and around a fifth more than in 2023. Education follows, while housing sees the steepest increase: its €1,900 million budget is more than four times the 2023 figure.