Startup Week
brand & social
↓
Timeline: January - March 2025
Team: 2
Startup Week is a sub-brand of tech@nyu focusing on bringing innovative, emerging startups to campus. This is done through our programming, which gives students perspectives on all things startups: design, engineering, growth, and more. The highlight of our programming was the Startup Week Buildathon, which welcomed over 200 participants to compete for $26k+ in prizes.
As Vice President of tech@nyu, I created a comprehensive and distinctive brand identity for 2026 Startup Week. I was responsible for creating a social media brand kit with assets and guidelines that would set Startup Week apart.
As our marketing team had to split efforts between organizing general tech@nyu events and Startup Week, I worked with one other designer to take on most of the Startup Week responsibilities. This was effectively a month-long campaign that guided our social media direction for the spring.
To keep our output consistent across two people and multiple platforms, I developed a brand guidelines document that defined our visual language: color palette, typography, and graphic elements. I anchored the system to the existing Startup Week website so that every post felt like a natural extension of the broader identity, whether someone encountered it on Instagram or LinkedIn.
My teammate on this project was mostly fluent in Figma, with not as much Adobe Suite experience, so I kept all of our work within one Figma file so that we could easily drag and drop elements into new graphics as needed.
During the week, we also wanted to emphasize video content, both short-form and long-form. We posted four Instagram reels for Startup Week, accumulating over 20,000 views and counting. Our longer form videos are set to release in late March; we wanted to curate high production value, well-crafted content to continue the momentum built through the Startup Week brand.
Startup Week 2026 was a resounding success, but it wouldn't have worked without an organized, consistent campaign that connected our audience with the events they wanted to see. The strength of the Startup Week brand proved to be extremely resonant with NYU students and even those beyond our community, as we saw students from schools like Columbia, UPenn, and Cornell travel far to compete in our Buildathon.
By constructing a specific and targeted brand strategy, we were able to make Startup Week 2026 the biggest one yet.
