IDL Ventures Outreach Campaigns

Overview

Marketing Design / Venture Capital Communications

Role

Visual Designer

Scope

Newsletters, Social Media, Campaign Assets

Project Type

IDL Ventures required a flexible visual system to communicate investment news, portfolio company updates, and marketing initiatives across multiple digital channels. I created cohesive marketing assets designed to strengthen engagement while maintaining a consistent brand presence.

IDL Ventures is a Chicago-based startup incubator focused on deep tech companies. I was responsible for visual communications, translating an established brand system into campaigns across newsletters, social media, pitch decks, swag, and partner materials.

IDL’s portfolio included startups at different stages, some with existing identities and some with none, which meant constantly shifting between extending a system and building one. I had to make each client’s work feel distinct while keeping IDL’s own communications cohesive.

Over the course of the engagement, I designed and templated a newsletter system in Mailchimp that reduced turnaround time for ongoing content, giving the team a scalable foundation they could run with independently.

The Problem: IDL's portfolio spanned companies at every stage; some with an established brand, some with none.

Every asset had to work two ways at once: distinct enough to carry each startup's own identity, cohesive enough to still read as IDL.

The Strategic Need: For an early-stage startup, every touchpoint is a chance to build credibility, since they don't have years of market presence to lean on.

IDL needed consistent, professional communication across newsletters, social, and partner materials, both to represent itself and to lend that same polish to portfolio companies still building their own identity.

Pictured: the reusable newsletter template structure, built in Mailchimp for future designers to populate and send.

Elevating Engagement through Consistent Strategy

The strategy focused on turning routine communications into a repeatable system rather than one-off sends.

Templated the newsletter structure in Mailchimp, built for handoff so future designers could maintain it without starting from scratch
Kept visual and copy consistency across all assets, including partner materials, in line with IDL's brand guidelines.
Turned internal milestones into newsletter headlines and subject lines that gave subscribers a reason to open.

The Takeaway: The newsletter system gave IDL a repeatable foundation the team could run independently. The same consistency carried into presentation design and podcast branding, keeping IDL's voice recognizable across every format its portfolio companies encountered.

Contact

contact@karolina-gostomski.com