The design duo have introduced a simple yet revolutionary format change that better explains the strategic thinking behind their work.
Every design studio faces the same problem: how do you showcase the work that doesn’t appear in a final design file? The invisible labour of strategy—the positioning frameworks, the naming rationales, the painstaking narrative architecture—rarely makes it into the polished case study.
What we get instead is the design industry’s most tired formula: hero shot, process overview, glossy deliverables, credits. Rinse, repeat, yawn.
Lauren Wong Lee and Gabby Lord—the design duo who work together as Super Keen Studio—has decided this simply won’t do any more. Their new studio website takes direct aim at the traditional case study format with an approach that feels both obvious and revolutionary. Namely, embedded video pop-ups that literally interrupt your scroll to explain the thinking behind the creative.
It’s a format born from frustration. “We’ve always found it tricky to showcase our strategy work,” explains Gabby. “Much of it is either too confidential to share directly or too complex to explain without losing the nuance. What really pushed us to rethink was noticing how imbalanced our case studies were. We take on three types of projects: Strategy + Design, Strategy-only, and Design-only. But until now, we only had case studies when design was involved, and that left out a big part of our work.”
For Lauren, the stakes were more personal. “I also collaborate a lot with design studios that don’t have in-house strategy expertise. I’m really proud of a lot of that work, but we didn’t have a good format to tell those stories. We thought this video approach was a good way to highlight those partnerships and the great work we did without overstating our role on the visual side of things.”
Human approach
The choice of video—specifically, videos featuring Lauren’s actual face and voice—was deliberate. “We aren’t convinced that people would actually read long write-ups,” Gabby admits bluntly. “It’s hard to grab attention these days! When we looked at how people were really consuming information and learning about projects, so much of it was happening in video format, on TikTok. We figured, if we can’t beat them, let’s join them.”
There’s vulnerability in this approach. Putting faces front and centre means nowhere to hide. But the duo believe that’s precisely the point.
“Research shows it really works,” Gabby continues. “Content featuring real human faces gets a lot more engagement. And in a moment where so much of what we see online is AI-generated or slop, showing our actual selves felt like the most human, honest thing we could do.”
It’s a canny observation. In an era of synthetic imagery and algorithmic homogeneity, showing an actual human explaining actual thinking feels almost radical. The format also sidesteps one of the perennial anxieties around discussing design work: that explaining it somehow diminishes the magic.
Lauren doesn’t buy into that fear. “Great design, to me, is always strategic,” she stresses. “It should never be overly intellectual, pompous, or hard to understand. I think people love hearing the stories behind design. I think it makes them more interested in the work and more impressed with the thinking and care that goes into the things they see.”
Client confidentiality
This philosophy extends to how they handle client confidentiality, which is always a thorny issue when showcasing strategy work. “We work on a lot of really sensitive projects, from new product innovations to entirely new companies operating in stealth,” Lauren explains. “Because of that, we don’t share projects that clients aren’t ready or comfortable to share publicly. We don’t share proprietary IP or sensitive business and product information. We don’t show brand strategy frameworks.
“A lot of the strategic work we do is crafting the story the brand wants to tell to the world,” she continues. “When we talk about the strategic approach of a project, we’re often telling the same story the brand is trying to broadcast to its audience. In other words, what we share in our case studies should be the same story anyone can find on the brand’s website, campaigns, and social content. It should be the story that shines through in every aspect of the brand, from the design system to the photography to the copywriting.”
The new website format also reflects the duo’s working dynamic. With Gabby leading design and Lauren leading strategy, the video pop-ups mirror their collaborative process. “At the very least, it’s our attempt to mirror it,” Gabby says. “Mostly it’s a way to spotlight more of what Lauren does; strategy makes up half of our business offering. While Lauren leads strategy and I lead design, we both cross over into each other’s disciplines because we believe they’re stronger together than isolated.”
For Lauren, who says she “got used to keeping quiet and having my work stay under the radar,” the new format has been a revelation. “Our old website made it impossible to show all the naming we did, all the collaborations we worked on with other studios, and even how diverse our client list really is. We wanted to make sure things were different with this new site.”
Fresh format
As for whether this gamble will transform how the industry values strategy work, the duo are refreshingly honest. “We don’t know yet if this shift will lead to more business or change how people value strategy, but we wanted to try something new,” Gabby says. “It’s a fresh format for us to play with, and we’ve been pleasantly surprised by how much we enjoy making them. Once we get past the part where we have to see our own faces, of course.”
Lauren echoes the sentiment: “It’s been fun to practise something new, even if content creation wasn’t on SK’s bingo card for this year. We hope people have fun learning about the project. We hope they get interested in the amazing businesses our clients have built. And we hope that people see how great strategy and design are when they’re put together.”
Whether this marks the death of the traditional case study remains to be seen. But make no mistake: Super Keen has done something rare and inspiring here. They’ve created a format that serves both their work and their audience, without sacrificing either strategic rigour or creative magic. That alone makes it worth checking out.
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