Writing Case Studies That Actually Get You Hired

Most portfolio case studies are galleries with a paragraph on top. Beautiful, but they do not tell a client the one thing they want to know: can this person solve my problem?

Answer five questions

1. What was the problem? One or two sentences, in the client’s words.
2. What was your role? Be specific about what you did and what the team did.
3. How did you find the answer? Research, sketches, the idea you threw away.
4. What did you ship? The final design, shown in context.
5. What changed? Numbers if you have them, a quote if you do not.

Design for skimming

Put the outcome at the top. Use short headings that tell the story on their own. Every image should have a caption that says why it is there.

Show the mess

The most convincing part of a case study is often the messy middle: the whiteboard photo, the rejected concept, the test that went wrong. It proves the final design was not luck.