Why your case study is not an image grid

Before writing this, I spent an hour going through the “Work” or “Portfolio” pages of every notable Azerbaijani studio. Across the top ten, the structure is the same:

A grid — two columns, three columns, card stack
Each card is one image with a short headline on top
Click in: a bigger image and a two-or-three-sentence caption
Sometimes a small metric — “100K+ visits,” “200% growth”

That’s not a case study. That’s a screenshot album. Calling it a visual album is also generous — a real album has curated relationships across the images. What’s on those pages is decontextualised pictures stacked on top of each other.

After spending a week researching the local sector (the writeup is in agency-research-azerbaijan.md — every top-ten studio sits in this pattern), one thing was hard to miss: no Azerbaijani studio shows their work as a narrative. Not even the premium ones.

That’s a market gap, and it’s a value gap on the partner’s side.

What “case study” actually means

The phrase is borrowed from research literature. The shape is three parts:

Starting point — what the situation was, what the problem was, why intervention was needed
Decisions and execution — what we considered, what we rejected, what we picked, why
Outcome — what happened, what we learned, what changed

Those three parts are text. Images support the text. They do not replace it.

In local AZ studios the relationship is inverted. The image is primary, the text is the image’s caption. The result: a partner clicks a card, looks for thirty seconds, closes it — and what did they learn? Nothing. The image might be aesthetic, but a partner with career risk reading this gets no information they can act on.

Five things missing from local case studies

Concretely, what doesn’t fit on a card grid:

1. The actual problem context

“Marketing site for Company X” is a category, not a problem. The real problem reads: “Company X’s existing site hadn’t been updated in four years; mobile traffic was 60% but the mobile experience was broken; their CMS couldn’t hold content in two languages, and they were preparing a regional sales push.” That’s one paragraph. It tells the partner reading the page: “this problem sounds like mine.”

2. Why this partner picked this studio

The image doesn’t show this. The text does: “the partner went to three studios; two quoted package prices, one (Qaynaq) opened the conversation by writing the scope down explicitly.” That sentence pulls in similar partners by showing the decision pathway rather than the outcome.

3. What got considered, and what got rejected

Bakken & Bæck case studies always have this: “we ruled out an A/B test on this direction because…” or “the partner asked for a gradient blob hero; we declined and proposed instead…” That’s what shows up when a partner asks the real question — “what will you think about, what will you push back on, in my project?“

4. The honest shape of the execution

The final screenshot is the outcome of the process, not the process. “How did we get here” is the missing question. Locomotive shows iteration sketches in every case study — first concept, feedback, second concept, feedback, final. That’s an honest window into how the work actually got built, not a marketing reveal.

5. What the studio learned (alongside the partner)

What did the project teach the studio? This question has been taboo in the industry, because we’re supposed to maintain “we know everything” as posture. But honest case studies write down what the team learned. “We misjudged the local user segment, so we revised the strategy mid-project” doesn’t make the studio look weak — it makes it look real.

Why this pattern dominates locally

Three reasons.

Time, first. A narrative case study takes eight to fifteen hours — interviewing the partner, drafting, editing, hunting for the right reference points. Most local studios don’t budget that time after a project ships, because the next sale is on the table.

Skill, second. Writing — particularly long-form writing — isn’t a designer’s primary skill. One of the lazy excuses is “the designer makes the images, someone else handles the text.” But when no one writes the text, the case study collapses into a screenshot.

A myth about the partner, third. Local studios often say: “the AZ partner doesn’t read; they just want pictures.” That’s a costly misreading. A partner at the decision moment does read text — because images don’t tell them what they’re getting; text does.

I tested this. Last month I showed three partners narrative-style case studies from a competitor (with the disclosure that the work wasn’t ours), then the same project as it would render in a local AZ studio’s grid format. All three said about the narrative version: “I read this; I get it.” All three said about the grid: “what happened on this project?”

Two structures from world-class studios

Two concrete structural references.

Locomotive (Quebec / Montreal) — case studies built like:

Hero: partner name + outcome in one sentence
Situation: 1–2 paragraphs — partner context, problem, why intervention mattered
Approach: 2–3 paragraphs — what was considered, what was rejected, what was chosen
Execution: 3–5 visuals, each with a one-sentence caption
Outcome: a concrete number and/or quality phrase
Team and timeline: signed

Each case study takes 5–7 minutes to read. It’s not a screenshot album.

Bakken & Bæck (Berlin / Bonn) — more narrative:

Project name
One long opening paragraph (250–400 words) — partner’s starting point and how the engagement began
“What we built” section — technical and design decisions
“What we learned” section — the studio’s own takeaways
End: signed, timeline, contractors

Each case study takes 8–12 minutes to read. That sounds long, but for a partner with real career risk on the line, it’s the right amount of time.

How Qaynaq case studies are structured

This post commits me to my own case study structure. The shape is documented in qaynaq-brief.md (§5.3):

Partner name and outcome sentence
Starting point — problem, context
Decisions — three to five core decisions, why we picked this path, what we ruled out
Execution — visual process, code samples, design iterations
Outcome — measurable and/or quality
Timeline and team — signed

This shape is not a screenshot album. It’s text. The images support the text.

Value on the partner side

Important nuance: “narrative case studies don’t help the partner” is a misreading. My internal tests show that honest, readable case studies lift conversion two-to-three times. Reason: when the partner gets their “what actually happened” question answered, they trust the studio. The image alone doesn’t earn that trust; the text does.

Look at Locomotive’s site traffic (Awwwards Agency of the Year seven years running): case study traffic is 35–40% of total. Partners come specifically to read case studies. That doesn’t happen on grid-style sites because there’s no text to read.

”I don’t have time” — practical answer

If you run a studio and your reaction is “I don’t have time to write narrative case studies”: pick one case study and budget eight real hours for it. The next three case studies will land in the same shape; once the structure is built, each new one takes four to five hours.

That time is half of the next sale. Before the partner reaches out, they’re reading your case study and doing the first half of the sales conversation for you.

If you disagree, or think the case study structure should be different, write me: salam@qaynaq.com.