Mariana Holcomb spent eight years at IDEO leading product engagements for clients in healthcare and financial services. David Park taught the senior studio at Cooper Union for a decade and ran his own brand-identity practice in between. By 2018 they had both watched the same thing happen to junior designers they were mentoring: they would sign up for a self-paced video library, finish three modules, and quietly abandon it.
The reason was not laziness. The reason was that no one was in the room. There was no crit on Friday, no mentor reviewing the work, no cohort waiting on the other side of the deadline. The infinite-scroll model had optimized for breadth of catalog and never for the moment when a beginner actually needs someone to tell them their layout is unresolved.
IWTD I was founded in 2019 as the school that Mariana and David wished had existed when they were starting out. Every program runs as a fixed cohort with a published start date. Every student is paired with a working senior designer from companies like Airbnb, Figma, and IBM at a 1:8 mentor-to-student ratio. Every program ends with a graduate portfolio reviewed by an external hiring panel of 40-plus design directors — the only offering of its kind in the online bootcamp category, and a feature the founders added after watching their first cohort land jobs on the strength of that review.
In 2022 the institute closed an $11.2M Series A led by Emergent Ventures, used to expand the mentorship network and the corporate hiring partnerships that now include Shopify, Atlassian, and more than 380 agencies. The school is headquartered in Brooklyn with a satellite studio in Lisbon, employs 38 full-time staff, and contracts a bench of 64 senior designer mentors across time zones. The publishing record has kept pace: four published curricula authored by the founders and their faculty, features in Fast Company, A List Apart, and Design Week, two consecutive Course Report awards for Best Online Design Program, and an NPS of 71 across the 2023 and 2024 cohorts.
The 12-week certificate, not a four-year tuition loan, is the unit of value. Everything else on this page is the evidence that the unit holds.
