Every studio has this folder. Years of shipped work — posters, labels, banners, liveries, catalogues — sitting in subfolders, unphotographed and unexplained. Ours had 115 assets from a single retail ecosystem: supermarket campaigns, hygiene packaging, festival creative, delivery branding.
The temptation is to show all of it, because all of it was real work. The result of that instinct is a portfolio that reads like a hard drive. So we set ourselves a harder brief: turn 115 assets into one artifact — the case study we called Shelf to Screen — and let the cuts do most of the design.
Curation rules beat curation taste
- One plate, one idea — if a piece needs a paragraph to explain, it is two plates or none.
- Kill duplicates ruthlessly: five similar offer posters become the single strongest one.
- Every plate must show either range or depth. Nice-but-redundant does not ship.
- Prefer the piece with a story — the cutline, the shelf photo, the van on the road.
- If removing a plate makes the whole set stronger, remove it. Repeat until it stops being true.
Rules matter because taste negotiates. On day one, everything feels essential; by pass three, the rules had cut 115 assets to 19 plates — and not one client who has seen it since has asked where the rest went.
A plate template makes many pieces one artifact
The plates span wildly different work: a spout pouch, a Diwali poster, a detergent label with its cutline, a delivery van. What unifies them is a template with fixed design tokens — consistent margins, one caption style that names the piece and the note, and a background logic that lets each asset sit in the same world. The template is invisible, which is exactly the job.
A case study is not evidence that you worked. It is an argument about how you think.
Sequence is the story
The order of the plates carries the narrative the title promises: it opens on the shelf — packs, labels, cutlines — moves through the street with posters and fleet livery, and ends on screens with app banners and social creative. Same brand, travelling from physical to digital. Nobody reads a paragraph explaining that arc; the sequence does it.
What we would tell any designer building one
Cut more than feels safe, build a template before you place a single image, and sequence the survivors like a story rather than a grid. The work you leave out is invisible in the final artifact — but it is the reason the artifact works.
