The AmplifierReal cases · Student · Design
Zoya, 21: a design portfolio due in a month, and a professor who calls the tools theft
Internship applications need a portfolio, the portfolio needs case studies, and every case study needs the thing she is worst at: writing about her own work.
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In brief
The situation. Zoya is in her third year of a communication design course in Ahmedabad. Internship applications open in a month and need a portfolio of five projects with a case study each. Her work is good; her writing about it is not, and her studio professor has made the department's position on AI clear. She has been avoiding the tools out of a mix of principle and fear, and now she has a month.
Step 1 — Define the End State
"Five case studies a studio head at a Mumbai agency reads in four minutes each and thinks: she can explain her decisions. Every image is my work. Every sentence about it is mine, tightened. My professor could read the whole thing and find nothing to object to." Audiences: one studio head, her professor, and herself at a review a year from now.
Step 2 — Map the Flow
Her list: choose five, write each, lay out, export. AI review adds: a consistent structure per case study (problem, constraint, decision, result), because agencies compare portfolios and inconsistency reads as carelessness; and a "why this decision" paragraph for each, which is what she avoids and what studio heads read for. It suggests generating mockups for context; she takes it only for device frames, never for any design element.
Step 3 — Assign Tasks
Which five, and what each decision was: hers — nobody else knows why she chose that typeface. Interviewing her about each project: AI, as a questioner — it asks, she answers into a voice tool, and the transcript is the raw material. Tightening her transcript into prose: AI, then every sentence hers to accept or rewrite. Layout: hers. Any image, illustration, colour, type: hers, no exceptions.
Step 4 — Select the Tool
A voice tool to record her answers (she talks better than she writes); a conversational tool to ask the questions and tighten the prose; her design software for everything visual. The line she draws is Kavya's line from the book: the intern, not the artist.
Step 5 — Prepare and Direct
Criteria: each case study under 250 words; every sentence I could say out loud to my professor; no word like "delve", "seamless" or "elevate"; each "why" paragraph names an alternative I rejected and why; every visual made by me.
Steps 6 and 7 — Execute and Evaluate
The interview method works: she says in three minutes what she could not write in three hours. The tightened prose fails "say it out loud" in a third of sentences — too polished — and she roughens them back. Two case studies lack a rejected alternative; she realises she never considered one, and says so honestly in the text, which reads better than a manufactured choice.
Step 8 — Integrate and Stress-Test
All five, read as the studio head in twenty minutes. Small fixes: inconsistent tense, one image too small. Structural: the strongest project is fourth; a Step 2 sequencing problem. Reordered. She shows her professor. He reads the whole thing, asks how she wrote it, and she tells him the truth: recorded herself, used a tool to tighten, made every image. "That's the right line," or its equivalent.
What changed
Three interviews from five applications. In each, she is asked about a decision and can explain it, because she said it out loud a month ago. The tools she feared turned out to be a microphone and an editor. The art stayed hers.
If you write badly about your own work, talk about it instead and let a tool tighten the transcript. Name a rejected alternative in every case study. Draw the line — tools for scaffolding, never for the work — and then say where you drew it.
A composite case, not a client engagement; the person is invented, the situation is not.