The College Kids Who Are Branding Tomorrow's Startups
“We are a group of ambitious college students who are interested in design and making the world a more beautiful place,” said James Wu, a sophomore at the Royal Allen School of Design. Wu runs flow.studio, the creative agency he co-founded in high school. Today, he manages a rotating team of college designers, most of whom balance flow.studio’s projects with coursework.
flow.studio focuses primarily on branding, logo design, visual identities, animations, launch videos, websites, and product design for early-stage tech companies. “Most of the clients are tech startups,” Wu said. “We love working with them because we can get a glimpse of what the future is going to look like.”
Wu traced the origins of flow.studio back to when he was thirteen, hoping to make extra money during the summer. Because he was too young for a job, he started looking for opportunities online with his friend Michael Roberson, a student at Columbia. At the time, Wu was known for his hyperrealistic colored pencil illustrations. Michael discovered logo design on Reddit and convinced Wu to join him. Their first paid jobs were fifty-dollar projects. “I still remember the first time we got a three-hundred-dollar project. It was the best day of my life.”
In this early stage, the work was informal and mostly seasonal. Then, Michael met a Columbia student building a Y Combinator-backed startup. “I did not even know what Y Combinator was at the time,” Wu said. This connection opened flow.studio to the world of tech branding and turned the side project into a real market.
Now, flow.studio’s process begins with deep research. They spend time understanding the client’s product and its story before touching any visuals. “If you do not understand what they actually do, most of the work becomes surface level,” Wu explained. After that, the team builds mood boards, maps out design spectrums, and positions the brand depending on its audience. Once they find the proper direction, they produce style tiles and iterate until they strike the right identity.
One of Wu’s favorite projects is a recent brand for Send, an AI company building tools for mergers and acquisitions. “We collaborated closely with the founders. Their mission is futurism with a sense of purpose,” he said. “The design is clean and futuristic, but the beige color palette keeps it calming.” The founders informed Wu that the brand helped investors better understand their product, and “that is the best thing you can ever do as a designer,” he said.
Looking toward the future, Wu plans to experiment more with AI tools and hire designers who can help the studio expand into product and interface design. He also wants flow.studio to remain a place where talented students can grow. “We are actively looking for designers,” he said. “If anybody at Princeton is interested in paid design work for tech startups, definitely reach out.”
Wu’s flow.studio stands as a testament that fruitful ideas can start in a high school bedroom and grow to someday shape how new technologies introduce themselves to the world.