Publish your first design case study
A portfolio of pretty pictures says "I can decorate"; a case study says "I can think". Publish your best design micro-internship as a proper case study — problem, process, evidence, outcome — with AI as your ruthless recruiter-editor before you hit publish.
Posted by The AI Internships
The work brief
- 01Pick your strongest design mission (the flyer fix, form redesign, poster test…) and gather every artifact: befores, iterations, test data.
- 02Write the case study in the professional arc: the problem → constraints → explorations (including rejected ones and why) → the tests → the outcome.
- 03Cut ruthlessly with an AI recruiter: paste the draft into ChatGPT or Gemini, ask it to read like a recruiter with 90 seconds, and cut what it skims — but overrule it where a detail proves your thinking. Lead with the result.
- 04Publish it publicly: Behance, Notion public page, Medium, or your portfolio site.
What you’ll produce
Submission standard
Submit the live case study URL and your editorial notes, plus your AI workflow. The page must show process, not just finals. Also submit the public share link to your AI recruiter-edit chat, and make sure the live page shows process artifacts, not just finals.
Live public URL of the case study
Must be a live public page showing real process artifacts (befores, iterations, test data), not just finals — a dead, private, or finals-only page fails.
Public linkRequiredEditorial notes: what you cut, what you led with, and the one decision you most want a recruiter to notice
Written responseRequired
You’ll complete these inside your private workspace.
What you must submit as proof
This brief requires evidence an AI can’t fabricate.
Public share link to your AI recruiter-edit chat
The ChatGPT/Gemini 'Share' link where the AI cut your draft like a 90-second recruiter — must be YOUR live chat showing the real back-and-forth, not a paraphrase.
Public linkRequired
Submissions without this evidence cannot be submitted.
Protect other people in your proof. Blur faces, names, phone numbers and email addresses before you upload, and refer to anyone you worked with by role or number ("Listener 1", "the stall owner"). Your proof is only ever used to check your work — it is never published, never appears on your certificate, and is never shown in your public portfolio.
How your work is evaluated
The passing benchmark is 70/100.
Published & complete
29%The live page tells the full problem→process→outcome story with real artifacts.
Design thinking visible
29%Rejected options and test evidence make the reasoning visible.
Editorial judgement
14%It’s tight — leads with the result, respects the reader’s 90 seconds.
Real process, first-party
29%Auto-fail if the live page shows only finals with no real process artifacts, if it reads as a generic AI-written study, or if the AI-edit chat link is dead/private. The editorial notes must reconcile with what actually changed on the page.
How we grade your AI usage
Using AI is the point — it’s the skill this certificate proves. You’ll answer three short questions about how you used it: what you asked, what was wrong with its first answer, and what you changed. Specific, honest answers score high. “I pasted the brief and submitted the answer” scores near zero.