On case studies that age well

Most agency case studies are written for the pitch and read badly two years later.

The pattern, if you have read enough of them, is recognisable. The case opens with a generic problem statement (“the client wanted to refresh their brand”). It moves to a generic process description (“we ran workshops to uncover their values”). It finishes with a generic outcome (“the new brand has been well-received internally and externally”). The case is full of words like “elevated”, “compelling”, and “future-proof”. It does not say what the studio actually did, what the constraints actually were, or what the result actually was.

A few rules I have settled on for writing case studies that hold up.

Write the case study after the project, not for the pitch. The case study written for the pitch is a marketing document. The case study written after, with eighteen months of distance, is closer to journalism. The journalism is more useful and more durable.

Name the constraints. “The client had a small budget” is uninteresting. “The client had eight thousand pounds and a four-week timeline” is interesting. The specifics make the case study credible. Generalities make it generic.

Show the work that was rejected. The case study that only shows the final design is showing a fraction of the project. The case study that shows three or four early directions, and explains why one was chosen and the others were not, is showing the actual design thinking. This is harder to write and more useful to read.

Use real numbers. “The site loads faster” is meaningless. “The site loads in 1.4 seconds on a 3G connection” is meaningful. “Conversions increased” is meaningless. “Conversions increased from 1.2% to 2.1%” is meaningful. If the studio cannot get permission to use the real numbers, the case study should say so, and explain what it would have shown if it could.

Acknowledge what did not work. Every project, even a successful one, has decisions that were wrong. A case study that names one or two of these reads as honest. A case study that pretends the project was uniformly successful reads as marketing.

Write in plain English. Short sentences. No agency vocabulary. If a sentence could appear in any other agency’s case study without modification, the sentence is not doing work specific to your project.

The studios whose case studies I keep coming back to: Pentagram, Studio Dumbar, Bibliothèque, and Pearlfisher. All four write cases that are recognisable for the studio’s voice, and that read as honest reports rather than as pitches.

A practical note. Most agencies treat the case study as the deliverable and the project as the input. This is the wrong order. The project is the work. The case study is, at best, an honest record of the work after the fact. Studios that write the case study before the project is finished tend to produce work that fits the case study they wrote. The work is, predictably, worse.