College of Communication, Media, Design and Information · University of Colorado Boulder colorado.edu/thebrandstudios

Design
for Startups

Sixteen weeks to conceive, validate, brand, and pitch a startup of your own invention. No client, no brief, no safety net.

Time & Place Tuesdays, 4:00–6:30 pm The Studios, 1301 Walnut St Boulder, CO 80302 Aug 25 – Dec 1, 2026 Finals: Tue, Dec 8 (per registrar)

Instructor Chris Znerold Department of MSCD zneroldc@colorado.edu 970-946-9306 Office hours by appointment

Two-Track Tuesdays Conceptual Thinking (CA track, Prof. Jeff Gillette) runs 1:00–3:30 pm at the Studios before this class. Cross-attendance encouraged.

Communication. Official course communication runs through CU email. Other systems may be blocked by spam filters. Expect every effort toward a reply within 24 hours.

01	Course Description

Beautiful experiences go nowhere without a story people care about.

Companies often split the experience from the story that sells it. This class puts product, brand, and business back in the same room. Over sixteen weeks, you will conceive, validate, brand, and pitch a startup of your own invention.

No client. No inherited brief. You are the founding team. You will start solo, move into a small team, generate ideas, choose the one that deserves to exist, prove somebody wants it, give it a brand worth believing, and pitch it like your rent depends on it. Along the way, you will build a repeatable process for finding product-market fit with real evidence and grow into the kind of multidisciplinary designer consumer companies fight to hire.

The course treats entrepreneurship as a working business discipline: finding opportunity, designing the model, structuring and funding the company, operating early, and understanding the exit. Design and creativity shape every decision. Each week turns one discipline (empathy, innovation, market, brand, voice, marketing, pitch) into a tight lecture, a hands-on workshop, critique, and a shipped milestone. Product, brand, and business stay on the table every Tuesday.

AI runs through the studio from week one. Research synthesis, prototyping, identity exploration, and campaign production now happen at a fraction of the old cost. Taste, judgment, and direction decide whether any of it is good. Every week asks you to use the tools and show where your judgment beat the default.

02	Learning Outcomes

By the end of the course, you will be able to:

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03	The Startup Studio Project

One project carries the semester: invent a startup and take it from a blank page to a pitch-ready venture.

Product The thing itself: the experience, prototype, and job it does.

Brand What it means: the story, voice, and identity that make it believable.

Business How it survives: the model, the market, and the money.

A venture stands on three legs. Every week works all three, with AI running through the process. Miss a leg by December and the stool falls over in front of an audience. The project runs in four phases.

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04	The AI-Native Studio

Startups now move at a different speed. A founding team with strong taste and fluent AI direction can synthesize research, ship a prototype, explore identity directions, and produce a launch campaign in days. Every module builds AI into the discipline it teaches.

Weeks 1–5 Sparring partner Expand and red-team ideas, draft interview guides, pressure-test synthetic personas, synthesize transcripts. Synthetic research prepares you for humans; it never replaces them.

Weeks 6–11 Analyst and instrument Source market sizing, map go-to-market options, ship prototypes, de-cliché the vision, test value props, explore archetypes, and encode brand voice.

Weeks 12–16 Production studio and adversary Explore identity territories, produce campaign kits and AI-video spots, rehearse against skeptical investors, and red-team the deck.

Generative AI belongs in the curriculum and in the work. The syllabus names capabilities instead of products: use the strongest language, image, video, and design-to-code tools available when you need them. Products change. Authorship, taste, and intent last. These norms are binding:

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This policy operates within CU Boulder's Honor Code; individual assignment briefs may modify permissions.

05	Two-Track Tuesdays

This course anchors the Experience Design track. A strong startup still needs a product people want and a campaign that gets it noticed, so the two tracks share Tuesdays. Conceptual Thinking (Prof. Jeff Gillette) runs 1:00–3:30 pm. Design for Startups follows from 4:00–6:30 pm, both at the Studios. XD students may arrive early. CA students may stay late. We will tune the collaboration as the semester unfolds.

Drop in Come any Tuesday and join the standing Brand & Ad Studio segment. Show up, plug in, leave with no extra assignment.

Commit Join a venture team from Pitch Day onward as founding art director, copywriter, or brand lead. With both instructors' approval, committed students participate fully without additional registration or tuition and receive credit in the Venture Book and final pitch.

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Ad-track students are also welcome at the midterm as a fresh-eyes panel. When timing does not produce full partner pods, this cohort workshops the briefs in role.

06	Required Materials

No textbook and no course fee. Readings, case studies, templates, and lecture materials are linked in the schedule and distributed through Canvas and CU email. Free-tier or student accounts for a frontier language model, an image model, and a prototyping tool are sufficient. No paid subscriptions are required.

07

Grading

Assessment Item	Structure	Points	Weight
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08	How a Studio Night Works

Most studio nights follow the same rhythm. Learn it once and you always know what is next.

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Critique begins with intent and description before judgment; feedback lands on the work, not the person. Pitch Day, the Midterm, the Agency Sprint, the Dress Rehearsal, and Demo Day deliberately break the pattern. Remote sessions may use video office hours plus portfolio-grade narrated walkthroughs with written critique.

09	Class Schedule, Fall 2026

Sixteen Tuesdays, 4:00–6:30 pm: orientation, thirteen content studios, fall break, and finals-week Demo Day. Each entry lists the week's product, brand, and business threads, the run of show, resources, AI and cross-track practice, and the next milestone.

Campus dates: classes begin Aug 25 · fall break Nov 23–27 · last class Dec 1 · finals Dec 7–11.

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Break

Tuesday, November 24 · Fall Break, No Class Fall break, Nov 23 to 27. Rest. Sharpen the pitch only if you feel like it. Nothing new.

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10	Course Policies

Each week is a chance to present the venture's progress and wow the studio. The syllabus sets the milestone. You decide what a great answer looks like. There are infinite ways to complete each assignment. Your job is to find the one that is shockingly inspired, brilliantly creative, and unexpectedly yours.

Treat every weekly presentation like a job-interview tryout. Bring polished, professional work that moves the product and the brand. Use the syllabus methods as scaffolding, then bring your own point of view to the outcome. Your fingerprints should be obvious, especially in an AI-native studio where generic output is one prompt away and worth nothing. This graduate program expects self-directed project management, design thinking, creative development, and an active designer-to-creative-director dialogue with your instructor. You are learning how to learn. Creativity, nerve, craft, and tolerance for risk matter as much as talent. Speak with your instructor or program director if that standard feels unclear or out of step with your expectations.

Assignments must be presented in class for critique to receive full credit. Late or otherwise unpresented work receives at most half credit. If a session is remote or a presenter is unavoidably absent, the instructor may authorize a scripted, portfolio-grade narrated walkthrough. It should show how you think and design, and written critique will follow.

The journal runs in the first fifteen minutes of the following class: two prompts, in your own words, no AI. There is nothing to pass or fail. Credit is for writing it, and you get one free miss across the semester. When a week includes a self-discovery assessment, its completed screenshot is part of the journal credit.

Do not miss class. If you must, notify your instructor and teammates in advance and complete your responsibilities on time.

11	University Policies & Required Statements

These course policies operate alongside the CU Handbook. Required university statements are updated annually. Current versions are at Required Syllabus Statements (Academic Affairs).

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