Designing for a hackathon
Written by: Annie Xu

Each year, students from around the world are eager to participate in hackathons and look forward to an exciting weekend filled with learning experiences, and a healthy dose of competition. Hackers can have very different impressions of each event- starting from the very first social media post.

No matter what we were told growing up, people do judge books by their covers. Design helps represent the identity of the organization and its values as well as what hackers can expect from the event experience. All of this is done through ✨ branding ✨.

Defining the brand identity is just one of the many aspects the Design team is responsible for on Hack the North. Designing visual assets, user experiences, and even wayfinding signage are just some of what falls under our purview. Throughout all of these projects, there are 3 pillars our design team carries into the design process:

Designing with intention 🔬

Designing collaboratively and efficiently 🤝

Designing for inclusion and accessibility 🌎

Designing with intention 🔬

How can we make our website more accessible? What narrative should we build with our brand? What information goes first on the sponsorship package?

When designing for a big event, we often have to make difficult decisions and hope that the decisions we make are objective. In reality, we sometimes get caught up designing in a bubble where we let our biases influence our decisions. As a design team, we make a conscious effort to be intentional with our design decisions and be well informed about our community.

When it comes to each design project, there are two things to always keep in mind: 1) What’s the desired outcome?, and 2) Who’s our audience?. When branding Hack the North 2020++, our goal was to simultaneously encompass the event’s direction while staying identifiable as the event our hackers all know and love. Specifically for 2020, we wanted to emphasize our main mission:

To make it easy for anyone to dream big and build.

Our audience includes passionate and innovative students from around the world. Each year we reach out to our hackers to ask for feedback on the event and their experiences, which helps us better understand the community we’re designing for.

What do our hackers value? What truly makes their experience special?

When designing the brand, we must consider what makes our hackathon unique to our audience. In order to push for inclusivity last year, we designed big and bold empowerment posters for the event. Since our hackers value these unique experiences, we wanted to showcase them on our landing page for 2020.
['Hack The North']
['Hackathons', 'Accessibility', 'Branding', 'Technology', 'Design']