Artifact

You've made the same resolution three years in a row.

This year I'm finally starting my company.

And then January ends. And then February. And by March the resolution is a tab you forgot to close.

Resolutions are free. They cost nothing to say and nothing to abandon.

The thesis

Phil Knight kept Bill Bowerman's waffle iron. The one Bowerman poured rubber into and changed running shoes. Wozniak still has the first Apple I circuit board. Miyazaki keeps pencil boards from forty years ago.

The people who change things don't talk themselves into starting. They start. They make the first thing. The thing that's embarrassing in the moment and priceless in hindsight.

That thing has a name.

Artifact.

Not a promise. A receipt. Proof the idea left the head and hit reality.

What it is

Artifact is the Founders, Inc. festival format. Five weeks. 120 hardware and software teams. One demo day. Each team submits a 60-second video showing the thing they made — the receipt.

The frame is the point. Show me your artifact is a different question than show me your business. It demands less. It also produces more, because the thing it asks for is the thing you'd be making anyway if no one was watching.

My role

• The Artifact name and positioning
• The festival visual identity — branding, signage, demo-day stage, motion language
• The 60-second-video template the 120 teams used
• The application and submission flow
• The on-campus festival design — print, signage, screen graphics, ceremony materials
• Post-festival narrative — the artifacts archive

The design move

A festival brand has to do two contradictory things. It has to feel like a moment — something specific, dated, that you were there for. And it has to feel like a system — something that can run again next year without losing its voice. The Artifact identity solves this with a stable wordmark and a date stamp that changes. The system stays. The moment stamps over it.

The 60-second video template is the under-discussed part. We didn't want 120 teams making 120 different-looking demo videos. We also didn't want them looking corporate. The template was a stage — same camera positions, same opening card, same closing frame — that builders could fill any way they wanted. The format did the work of making the festival feel like a single show without making the demos feel uniform.

What shipped

• Brand identity for the festival format
• Stage, screen, and signage design
• The 60-second-video template
• Application and submission flow
• Demo-day program, scoring system, and ceremony materials
• The artifacts archive — a public record of the receipts