I was approached by the engineering team to help create a poster that would go up in the office to promote our Summer Hack-A-Thon event. This event was intended to bring together employees from various disciplines together to work on new innovative ideas for our company. I was concerned that employees in non-coding disciplines would feel unmotivated, so I was hoping to find a way to make their engagement feel wanted through the poster designs. After the posters were done I was also asked to create t-shirt designs and a trophy design so I aimed to keep them all under one visual identity.
First I just tried creating a few concepts that might address the issue of cross-disciplinary mingling. Starting with the posters I tried a few of these concepts from my sketchbook. As that evolved I let it set the concept and mood for the t-shirts and trophy designs.
The posters started with a few broad ideas, and then we narrowed to one or two we liked. I continued working on variations of the chosen ideas and tested them in a few different ways to refine the design into something effective for print.
I started really bold with the t-shirt designs—adding repeated text all over in different colors. Once we got the printing estimate I had to go back and heavily reduce the design.
Here's the final poster and t-shirt designs that were used for the event. From the poster designs emerged a visual mark that I ended up using across all the different components of the project, much like a logo. Each small-text work came from the different themes we were trying to encourage participants to explore during the event.
The posters were used as a way to promote the event. Employees could use the QR code on the poster to submit their ideas for the Hack-a-thon. Most employees wore their t-shirts during and even after the event, and the winning team was delighted to get their trophy!
