Your Work Is Not Self Explanatory

Image credit: Emily Simms / The New York Times, circa 2018-ish.

I don’t want you to feel alone if you feel like the moment you start pulling together a case study for your portfolio/website/gram; the idea gets flattened. The tension disappears. Months of conversations, wrong turns, small breakthroughs and slightly panicked decisions are compressed into a paragraph about “bringing the brand to life through a bold and cohesive visual system.”

Beautiful. Stunning. Vanilla.

You’re all of a sudden describing almost every project made by almost every agency since someone first put a logo on a tote bag. And you start to dread drafting this in a LinkedIn post because you’re your own worst nightmare. (Same!!)

Creative portfolios are full of highly individual work explained in remarkably identical language, similar to any cover letter really. We talk about authenticity, connection, impact, storytelling and meaningful engagement until the words no longer mean anything.

And it is a shame, because the case study is the part that tells people how you think. Which is your biggest strength if you’re reading this.

The finished work can show taste, craft and technical ability. The case study explains what you noticed, what you understood, what you chose and what you were prepared to leave out. It gives the reader the conditions surrounding the idea, not just the beautifully art-directed evidence that it eventually existed.

Nothing revolutionary there. Five dependable headings that can vanish at the end if you wish. Consider this a strategy template wearing a black turtleneck.

The background section does not need to begin with the year the client was founded. Unless the year is somehow central to the problem, we can probably keep moving.

Background is about the conditions that made the work necessary. What had changed? What had stalled? What was the organisation beginning to understand about itself? Why did the work need to happen now and not three years ago, or three years from now?

Perhaps one of these questions will guide you to your answer:

• What was happening around the brand, business or audience?

• What had changed in the market or culture?

• What was the client known for—and was that still useful?

• Was the organisation growing, launching, correcting, recovering or becoming something new?

• What did people already believe about it?

• Why had the existing approach stopped being enough?

• What was at stake if nothing changed?

Remember: keep it narrow and deep.

Not:

We were approached by a leading organisation to create a refreshed brand identity.

But perhaps:

The organisation had grown well beyond the service it was best known for, but its identity was still telling an older and much smaller story.

Now we have something. A bit of movement to work with. There is a gap between what the organisation is and what people think it is. The reader can already feel why this work matters. Background should not be a biography. It should be the opening scene.