There was a time, starting out, after I chose my design focus and started building up my personal projects, when I wanted to put my work out there to be seen. Soon, I realised that just uploading the finished work on Dribbble or Behance wasn’t even close to the full potential of showcasing my work.
Nobody is really a creator without an audience.
Tell your story
Great design is remarkable in itself, but it only represents the final product. Maybe some people are going to learn from it, others are going to want to use it, but I’m sure that most of the people will press the like button and scroll past it. We live in the consumerism era, people consume thousands of pieces of content every day. What makes yours stick with them from all the others?
The idea behind all the artwork that they are seeing is at least as important as the final product. To me, the story of how the designer came up with a certain piece, the struggles, mind-mapping, inspiration are fascinating.
It basically opens a little viewfinder through which I can take a look at their minds.
Show them your mind
Somewhere in a corner of your mind there are definitely all the ideas, all the process, even if you weren’t aware of it at the time of creating the artwork. For your work to stick with the viewers, they need to have a story to match with what they are looking at.
This is where case studies come in extremely handy!
What is a case study?
A case study is a record of researching the process of how something was created, in this case an artwork. It consists of both the written part (explaining how you achieved an element) and the visual part (where you divide the outcome into multiple smaller elements or into steps in the process so that the viewer can see the artwork’s evolution).
— in this article I talk about the studies made visual, in form of design, not blog posts —
Speaking design fluently
Believe it or not, being decent at writing about design, your design most importantly, makes a huge difference from those thousands of pieces of content that I was mentioning earlier.
The written part of a case study should take the reader/viewer through the entire process, focusing on a few key moments and some important elements that make up the most of your design.
Frameworking
- Inspiration
It all came from somewhere, didn’t it?! Briefly present what inspired you to choose that particular thing to showcase, that technique, the color scheme or the elements. To me, inspiration usually comes from other fellow designers’ work, music, car industry, urban and street styles. - Major decisions
Sometimes the process of decision making represents an extremely useful tool for other designers that are seeing your work, helping them out with their own issues. Besides, an artwork consists of all the decisions that the creator made, so documenting those can actually give a more realistic dimension to the final product. Even the “wrong” ones are worth showing, they add to the more human feel of it, I’ll go more in depth here in a minute. - Interest elements
Interest elements are those that don’t stand out, that aren’t of utmost importance to the message that the design is aimed at conveying, but they play an important role in the composition. Sometimes, they can be related to the piece in focus, which makes it seem more authentic and committed to the theme.
What is consistent here is giving the viewers CONTEXT. Showing them the behind the scenes, what may be invisible to the eye at the first glance in the design itself or the story of its creation.
You know what they say: Put a name to a face.
Now, the actual part of writing it is harder, I know. Figuring out your writing style takes time,but if you want to develop it for the sole purpose of documenting your designs through Case Studies (where written content is not as lengthy as in something like an article) I have a simple tip for you to follow.
Make it feel human
Leave the fancy words out and try to use a simple language, explain to a friend how you got to create those particular things and put it in writing. Don’t write an essay, simple words and most importantly, not too many of them is the way to approach this.
For every “headline”, meaning idea or element that you are explaining, find a title (it can even be really to the point like “font choice” or more abstract such as “behind the scenes”). Structuring your case study in headlines will make it easier for the reader to follow you and not get bored.
My idea just popped up, how do I document a process I don’t recall?
I found myself in this position, especially when designing for certain assignments, where I was constantly thinking about stuff, hunting for ideas and got to a point where I couldn’t trace my idea flow back.
What saved me every time was taking the final idea and breaking it into pieces. What did it represent? What can I link it to now? I then took those and documented them. Even if they don’t represent the original flow, they are still true to the design I made. This is what is truly important, documenting what that final artwork means to the creator.
Same applies to those elements in your design that just got put there by chance, maybe trying out several things and that particular one seemed to be matching. Starting out, that happens a lot, having something but not being able to explain why you chose it. Take it and just document its existence, make people aware of the fact that it is there.
Case study is a design in itself
Case study is basically a piece of research design about another artwork. That means that it should have its own composition and style. I usually go for a minimalist approach, focused on typography, large and bold for first page that also appears as thumbnail and choosing a font family for the entire written part of the study, keeping it consistent and just switching from regular to light or bold to regular for headlines and bodies.
The important part to keep in mind when designing a case study is that it only represents a mean of showcase. It only exists to put the artwork in focus, so make sure the composition emphasises the artwork, not the study.
Another important thing to be aware of are the sizes of the showcase artwork. Make sure you don’t have to tweak the original in order to fit in the case study artboard, but the other way around.
If you feel the need of a practical example that matches exactly what I have explained in this article, check out my case studies on my process of BMW rebranding: BMW Rebranding.
You got the idea? You consumed? Now go create!
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