By Mehdi HassanWhat does a one-week brand sprint agenda look like?
A one-week brand sprint agenda has five stages: decide, explore, choose, apply and hand over. Each stage ends with a concrete output, and each needs one specific input from the founders. Knowing those inputs in advance is what keeps a sprint on schedule.
This is the template we work from and the order of work we follow. Our own brand & design sprint is fixed-scope and fixed-price, and we confirm the exact calendar on the intro call, since it depends on when your decision-makers are free. If you're new to the format, our guide to what a brand sprint is explains how it differs from a workshop and from a full agency project.
Day | Stage | Founder time | Output |
|---|---|---|---|
Day 1 | Decide | Main session, most of the morning | Positioning, headline, personality |
Day 2 | Explore | None, or a short check-in | Two or three visual directions |
Day 3 | Choose | One review session | A single chosen direction |
Day 4 | Apply | Async comments | Identity on website and product screens |
Day 5 | Hand over | A walkthrough call | Source files, exports, usage rules |
What happens on day one of a brand sprint?
Day one is for decisions, not design. The founders and the studio run the core brand exercises, agree on positioning and write the first version of the homepage headline. Nothing visual is drawn until this is done.
- Context. The studio plays back what it learned from your pre-sprint inputs: customers, competitors, what must stay.
- Core exercises. A compressed version of GV's workshop: values, audiences, personality sliders and a competitor map. Our walkthrough of the three-hour brand sprint explains each one.
- Positioning. Who it's for, the problem and why you over the alternatives, in a few sentences.
- The headline. One sentence for the homepage hero, plus a subhead. This forces any remaining vague positioning into the open.
- Constraints. Where the brand appears first, any colors or symbols to keep, and must-have formats.
Client input for day one: the people who make the final call, in the room, for the whole session. This is the one session that can't be done asynchronously.
What happens on days two and three?
Day two is for exploration and day three is for choosing. On day two the studio develops two or three distinct visual directions. On day three the founders review them and commit to one by the end of the session.
Day two: explore
Each direction includes a logo or wordmark approach, a palette, a type pairing and the day-one headline set in a real website hero. Directions should be genuinely different points of view, not three versions of the same idea. Founders usually aren't needed, though a short check-in to answer questions helps.
Day three: choose
The review starts with each direction shown at real size, next to competitors' homepages. Founders give feedback against the day-one decisions, not personal taste. The session ends with one direction chosen, sometimes with elements borrowed from another. Client input: a decider who can say yes in the room.
How to give feedback on brand directions
Feedback works best when it points back to a decision. "This feels too playful for an audience of CFOs" is useful because it references the audience ranking and the personality sliders. "I don't like green" isn't, unless you can say why green conflicts with something you agreed.
A simple structure: for each direction, say what fits the positioning, what conflicts with it, and what you'd keep if you chose a different one. Ten minutes of structured feedback beats an hour of open discussion.
What happens on days four and five?
Day four applies the chosen identity to real screens and day five turns it into files you can use. These two days are where a sprint proves its value, because problems that are invisible on an artboard show up immediately in a navigation bar or a dense dashboard.
Refine the mark
Tighten spacing, build the icon or favicon version and check it at small sizes, on light and dark backgrounds.
Apply to website screens
Design key website sections: hero, features, pricing or proof, footer. These double as the starting point for your site.
Apply to product or deck
Show the identity on a product view, an app icon or a pitch deck cover, depending on where the brand appears first.
Fix what breaks
Adjust colors that fail contrast, type that's too light for body text and marks that blur at favicon size.
Prepare handover
Organise the Figma file, export logo files, document color roles, type sizes and voice examples.
Walk through it
A short call to show the team how to use the files and what to do when a new format comes up.
Client input for day four: comments on the applied screens, ideally within a few hours. For day five: a list of who needs the files. Brand sprint deliverables lists everything the handover should include.
How much founder time does a brand sprint agenda need?
A brand sprint needs roughly a day of founder time across the week: most of day one, a review on day three, comments on day four and a walkthrough on day five. The rest of the week, the studio works and the founders run the company.
The cost of missing an input is higher than it looks. A day-three review that slips by a day doesn't lose an hour; it pushes application to day five and squeezes handover. Block the calendar before the sprint starts. This is one reason the format suits small founding teams, and why a consistent, quickly decided brand is one of the trust signals early-stage startups need.
How do you adapt the brand sprint schedule?
Adapt the calendar, not the order. Decide before you explore, choose before you apply, and apply before you hand over. You can stretch the stages over two weeks if founders are travelling, or run day one remotely, but skipping or reordering stages is where sprints go wrong.
- For a refresh rather than a new identity. Day one is shorter, since most positioning holds. See brand refresh vs rebrand to decide which you need.
- For developer audiences. Spend more of day four on documentation and product screens. Developer tool branding explains why.
- For illustration-heavy brands. Illustration style needs its own exploration; it rarely fits inside the same five days. Brand illustration style covers how to develop one.
- For a remote team. Keep the day-one and day-three sessions live on video; everything else can be async.
If you want to test how a studio works before committing to a sprint, a paid trial week with a design partner follows a similar rhythm on a smaller scope.
