Dragan Babic enables design.

I hate case studies

There, I said it. I hate making them, and there have been only a few I have actually enjoyed reading.

The textual content I can manage, but the images are a nightmare for me. This really tells a story about my strengths and weaknesses as a designer. I find it really hard to design something when its only purpose is to be pretty.

Also, we never had much success with case studies at Superawesome as our typical type of client never pays much attention to them. There were a number of times that a client asked for some work samples only just before we were signing the contract, in order to satisfy a protocol. This is why we don't have a standard portfolio on our website, and moved all our work to Behance. It's mainly for other designers anyway.

Despite all this, I think the case study format is still the best way to tell a story and describe one's involvement in a project. The thing is, the format needs to be right, and the content is paramaunt.

If you are going to use the same old format of showcasing visuals with typography samples, and color schemes, you have lost me. I have zero interest in reading that.

What I will read and enjoy is if you're able to show me the interesting parts of a project. Where were you stuck, and what you did to solve it? What did the design process look like? What did you measure, and what did you learn?

On that note, I've set out to do some work and tell a few—hopefully interesting—stories of the projects I have been involved in, and have showcased here. I have chosen to show them because they are dear to me, and I think they are interesting, I just never got past the little summaries I wrote a few years ago.

Because this is going to be a long-ish process I'm going to roll them out gradually, and for now I'm publishing the first one. It's called New product strategy for collaboration SaaS, and it tells a story of me working with an amazing company in order to help them figure out a new chapter for their flagship product. This one doesn't have any cool graphics—other than the actual documents which I do try to make as interesting as possible—because my involvement was more research-based, but for the other ones which are in the making I have even taken the time to produce some graphics I am kind of proud of.

As always I was working on on this one as a part of Superawesome, leading a team of designers through a discovery process, and then letting them do their thing when it came to proper visual design work.

Check it out, and hit me up if you have some comments.

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2024-01-23

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Dragan Babic is a design consultant enabling creatively challenged organizations to nurture design, and work with design professionals in productive ways.

You are reading his blog.