The version we did not want to make
A studio with a thin client list has three options. It can pad the page with work it did as an employee somewhere else, it can mock up a famous brand's homepage and call it a redesign, or it can invent the business and do the whole job properly.
The first two are dishonest in ways that are not worth arguing about, and the second one is also usually bad design: a made-up brief for a real brand is a brief whose constraints nobody has to live with. So the work page is fiction, and says so on the page rather than in a footnote.
What a direction shows that a case study cannot
A case study tells you what happened. A direction shows you what we would do - and because the business, the copy and the pictures are all ours, nothing is hidden behind an NDA or a client's brand guidelines. You can see the type, the colour, the empty states, and the decisions underneath them.
It also cuts both ways, deliberately. If the concepts are not the sort of thing you would want for your business, you have learned that in five minutes rather than three weeks into a project.
What we would need from you
The same thing, honestly: what your business actually is. Not a mood board - we will bring those - but who your customers are, which of them you would like more of, and what is true about you that is not true about the business down the road. Everything after that is craft.