Length: 350–500 words. Asset: three rejected direction visuals, treated as legitimate work — not sketches, not napkin-grade. A senior AD's rejected direction looks like another brand's final answer.
Why this chapter matters most: the hiring panel reads this most carefully. Showing what you considered and refused communicates more about your judgment than showing what you shipped. They are looking for evidence of taste, not evidence of effort.
Opening sentence
Template: "Three directions were considered for [X]. Two were good. We rejected them for these reasons."
The phrasing matters. "Two were good" — not "two were considered" — admits that the choice was hard. That admission is the entire credibility of the chapter.
The three rejected directions
For each: a working name, one or two rendered visuals at finished fidelity, and a paragraph explaining the rejection — citing user evidence, business reality, or accessibility concern.
Direction A — [working name]
One-sentence positioning: what was this version's central conviction?
Visual fidelity required: finished render or finished screen. If a hiring AD scrolled past this image without context, it should look like a real brand's final answer — not a wireframe, not a mood board, not a Midjourney scrap.
Why we rejected it: one paragraph. Cite user evidence (a specific test, a specific population), business reality (a constraint that surfaced late), or accessibility concern (a specific failure mode against WCAG, vestibular safety, motor mobility, etc.).
The rejection reason must be a real reason. "It didn't feel right" is not a reason. "We tested it with the night-shift operator cohort and the temperature reading at 4 AM was misread as red against the amber service-state in 4 of 8 sessions" is a reason.
Direction B — [working name]
One-sentence positioning:
Visual:
Why we rejected it:
Direction C — [working name]
One-sentence positioning:
Visual:
Why we rejected it:
Closing
Two or three sentences. The closing acknowledges that one of the three rejected directions was, on a different brief, the right answer. This generosity to the rejected work is the senior signal — it says you understand that craft is contextual, not absolute.
End with a single sentence that points forward to what survived. Do not preview the answer; just point.
Draft notes (delete before publishing)
- Working names for A / B / C:
- Render fidelity check: would each rejected direction be mistaken for another real brand's final?
- Specific evidence cited for each rejection (user test, business constraint, accessibility test):
- Did one of the three nearly survive? Which? Why didn't it?