10 /10 Be proud of your work

Anton Repponen Creative director • Fantasy interactive • NYC

I know so many designers who aren't happy with their work at the end of a project. “It might have been so much cooler,” they say. "If only I'd known that this would be the final result”.

And to be honest, I'm one of them.

But it's important to be proud of your work, and make a statement with it. This is how we came up with the case studies we do at Fi for the key projects we complete.

A couple of years ago we completed a nice HTML5 basketball game for Google. We struggled with it, not knowing how to showcase it properly. Small images in our portfolio wouldn't be enough, but video wasn't an option either: we wanted to keep it interactive.

Instead, we came up with a special promo page where we embedded the HTML5 piece, wrote up the story behind the project and highlighted design elements that were hard for users to see. In later case studies, staff started to show designs that were rejected by the client, just to show how the final piece evolved. Then we started to show the UX process that led up to the design. At some point we even began to highlight the original pitch we did for the client, to draw a full circle around the process.

Nowadays, Fi case studies are projects in their own right. They're statements that showcase the thinking and energy we put into the work we do, all the way from idea to launch.