Concept, published, and client work
Most portfolios use one word for three different claims. Here is what each label on this site means, and what it deliberately does not say.
Design portfolios are written in a vocabulary that sounds precise and is not. A page says "project", and the reader supplies the rest: that someone commissioned it, that it shipped, that it worked. Usually only one of those three is true, and the page has quietly declined to say which.
This studio's case studies carry one of three labels, or none. The distinctions are not marketing categories. They are answers to three separate questions that portfolios habitually collapse into one.
Three questions, not one
When you look at a case study, you are usually trying to establish three things at once:
- Did someone pay for this? Whether the work was commissioned tells you it survived a conversation with a budget holder, a brief, and someone else's deadline.
- Does it exist? Whether the thing runs in public tells you the design closed the gap between a layout and a working product.
- Did it work? Whether it moved a number tells you about outcomes.
Those are independent. Commissioned work can die before launch. Self-initiated work can ship and be used daily. And a live URL says nothing whatsoever about outcomes, because a portfolio page is not a measurement.
A live URL proves a product runs. It proves nothing about who paid for it.
What the three labels mean here
So the labels on this site answer questions one and two, separately, and never answer question three.
Client project
Commissioned work. On this site that is Gavroche and HYS Games. The label says the engagement happened. It does not claim the work is live, and for one of those two there is no live embed on the page — which is the honest state of it, not an omission.
Published
Demonstrably live, without a confirmed commercial relationship. Lowkar embeds a working deployment; Medhat Soody is live and credits the studio in its own footer. Both prove the product runs. Neither is described as client work, because nothing available proves who paid — and inferring a business relationship from a URL is exactly the move this label exists to avoid.
Concept
Self-initiated, not publicly released. Binala and Pluto. This is the label most portfolios refuse to use, because "concept" is read as "unfinished". It is not a lesser category — it is a different one, and mislabelling it is what makes readers distrust the rest of the page.
Why "published" is the useful one
"Client project" and "concept" are familiar. The interesting category is the one in between, and most portfolios do not have it — which is why so much work gets rounded up into "client".
A product that is live has crossed a set of thresholds that a concept never faces. Real content instead of placeholder copy. States for empty, loading, and error. Behaviour on a slow connection and on a small screen. Text that still fits when a translation runs forty per cent longer. None of that shows up in a flat mockup, and all of it shows up the week before launch.
That is genuine evidence of capability, and it is separate from evidence of commercial demand. Collapsing the two throws away information in both directions: it inflates the concept work and it makes the shipped work less legible.
Reading anyone else's portfolio
Applied to a portfolio you are evaluating, the three questions turn into a short list of things to check rather than take:
- Is there a live link, and does it still work? A dead link is not a failure, but it changes the claim from "runs" to "ran".
- Does the live product resemble the case study? Case-study imagery is often the pitch, not the build. If the two diverge sharply, ask which one shipped.
- Are the shown screens the hard screens? A marketing page and a settings table take very different amounts of work. Portfolios show the first.
- Does the page name what the studio actually did? "Worked on" spans a spectrum from art direction to writing the frontend.
- Are outcome numbers sourced? A percentage with no measurement period, baseline, or method behind it is decoration.
The last one deserves its own sentence. Numbers are the easiest thing to put on a portfolio and the hardest to verify, and they are why the labels on this site stop at question two.
Where the numbers are
There are none on this site, anywhere. No conversion lifts, no engagement rates, no users-served counts, no awards, no testimonials. Not because the work has no effect, but because a studio reporting on its own results with no measurement design behind them is writing copy, not evidence — and a reader has no way to tell the two apart.
So the pages state what can be shown: what was built, how it was structured, which decisions were made and why, and whether the result is live. If you want to know how a specific piece of it performed, that is a conversation with whoever owns the analytics, and it is a reasonable question to ask before hiring anyone.
If a project of yours is somewhere in these three states and you are deciding what it needs next, tell us what you are building.