Inkling Company Hack-A-Thon

Event branding for Inkling’s 2019 summer Hack-a-thon

Inkling Summer Hack-A-Thon 2019 Banner Image

Project Brief

Design Challenge: How can a poster (t-shirt, and trophy) be designed to create buzz around the office, and bring employees together for a company-wide Hack-A-Thon event?

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.

Skills & Tools Used:

Final Designs

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.

Hack-a-thon logo
final hack-a-thon logo mark
Hack-a-Thon poster
one of the posters on display in the office
Hack-a-Thon trophy and t-shirts
the t-shirt and trophy carry the same hack-a-thon mark

Design Process

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.

Hack-a-thon sketchbook of ideas
early concept sketches

Poster Concepts and Iterations

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.

retro-inspired concepts
role-inspired hat concepts
glitch-inspired concepts
progression of the glitch-concept

T-Shirt Concepts and Iterations

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.

t-shirt design iterations

Final Designs

Here’s the final poster and t-shirt designs that were used for the event.

final poster design
final t-shirt design, front and back

Conclusion

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!

Hack-a-Thon fans in t-shirts
some of the Inkling team wearing the official hack-a-thon t-shirts
Hack-a-Thon posters in the hallways
flyers displayed on conference room windows
Hack-a-thon winners
the winning team

This project was made by and for Inkling (2019).

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