The case for one-page case studies

There's a version of a portfolio that exists to impress other designers: tabs for research, tabs for wireframes, tabs for iteration history. It photographs well in a screenshot but almost nobody clicks through all of it, because the person deciding whether to hire you is scanning for one thing, whether you can produce the result they need.

A single scrolling page does that job better. Overview, the actual screens, a short note on what changed and why, and a way to contact you. No navigation to figure out, no tabs to lose track of, nothing standing between the visitor and the decision they came to make.

This isn't an argument against documenting process. It's an argument against making the visitor dig for the part that actually matters to them. If the process is genuinely interesting, it earns a sentence next to the screen it produced, not its own tab.

The result is a page that takes two minutes to read instead of fifteen, and gets read in full instead of abandoned on the second tab. Fewer people bounce, and the ones who reach the bottom already understand what working with you looks like.