All case studies
Fifteenth Labs · Product WordPress plugin · 2026

The case study page I kept not writing.

Every designer knows they should publish case studies. The page builder makes it a chore and the result looks like a blog post. I turned the whole thing into a form, then used it to publish this page.

Client
Studio 15th, then other designers
Role
Product design, development
Timeline
One evening
Deliverables
WordPress plugin, this page
01

The brief

I had just finished a plugin for a proposal and wanted to write it up. The studio site runs on BeTheme. Writing the case study meant either fighting the page builder for an hour or pasting raw HTML into the editor and never touching it again. I had two case studies to publish and six more in drafts, and the thought of doing that eight times was enough to not do it at all.

The page itself wasn't the hard part. I already had a template: headline, facts bar, hero, brief, constraints, a pull quote, process images, steps, outcome, tools. The hard part was that every case study meant rebuilding that structure by hand and hoping it matched the last one.

02

Constraints

  • Publishing a case study had to take less time than writing it
  • Every study had to look identical in structure without copying and pasting
  • Concept work and client work needed different endings, with no invented metrics on concept pages
  • Another designer had to be able to install it and not end up with my colors

If the recipe plugin could turn a form into a recipe card, the same trick could turn a form into a case study.

03

What I did

Same pattern as the recipe plugin. A custom post type with one guided edit screen, in the order the page renders. Kicker, headline, summary, four facts, hero picker, brief, constraints one per line, pull quote, what I did, two process images with captions, steps, a full-width image, outcome, link, tools. Anything left blank simply doesn't render.

Client or concept. A switch at the top. Concept work gets a badge, ends with "What this explored" instead of "The outcome," and hides the testimonial slot. That's a rule I wanted enforced by the software, not by remembering it.

Small writing helpers. Wrap a phrase in brackets in the headline and it gets the accent highlight. Start a paragraph with "Label:" and it becomes a bold lead-in. Steps are paragraphs with a short first line. None of it needs explaining twice.

The design. Modern editorial. One variable font served locally, an oversized headline, numbered sections, large numerals on the steps, a dark outcome band. Accent and dark colors are settings, so another designer's site doesn't look like mine.

The index. Created automatically at /case-study/, with cards that pull the hero image and summary from each study. Intro text and the closing call to action live in settings, written once.

What the form looks like when logged in.
The index builds itself from the hero image and summary of each study.

How it came together

  1. 01

    Start from the template

    I already had a static HTML case study template I liked. The job was to turn its sections into fields and its CSS into a stylesheet the plugin owns.

  2. 02

    Reuse what worked

    The image picker, the Food/Drink switch, the paragraph-to-steps parser, the settings screen: all lifted from the recipe plugin and renamed. Second plugin took a fraction of the time of the first.

  3. 03

    Fix the specificity bug

    The first render had the summary colliding with the facts bar. Element-level resets were beating class-level margins. Switched the resets to :where() so they have zero specificity. Ten-minute fix, worth writing down.

  4. 04

    Publish with it

    The first real page made with the plugin was the recipe plugin's case study. The second is this one.

What this explored

A case study now takes as long as writing it, because writing it is all there is. The structure is the same every time without trying, concept and client work are handled correctly by default, and the index keeps itself current.

Beyond my own site, it's a product: a small plugin that does one thing designers avoid and makes it a form. It's the third release under Fifteenth Labs, and the one with the clearest buyer.

See the index it built

Built with

  • WordPress
  • PHP
  • Custom post types
  • Manrope
  • Schema.org JSON-LD

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