Hack the North is Canada’s biggest collegiate hackathon. Every year, 1000+ hackers and hundreds of other attendees congregate in Waterloo, Ontario for 36 hours of building. Our mission statement is to make it easy for hackers to dream big and build, as part of the pipeline into the tech industry.
Our brand exists to communicate Hack the North’s mission and values. Some of our central themes are innovation, quality, and approachability.
These attributes inform our storybook theme. Fairytales, adventure and the implicit feeling of leaving behind something old for something new are at play. Our tagline, “Where will your journey take you?”, alludes to the open-endedness of a journey. Some of the building motifs on the website include a lighthouse, a castle, and a cabin; they’re maybe-faraway places that represent maybe-faraway ventures. It hints at all the possibilities hackers have when hacking at Hack the North. The initial website and branding launch reflects the belief that each person writes their own story.
Thereafter, we bring out different parts of our theme for different projects. For the hacker application website this year, we delve further into the storybook aspect, with a customizable boat accompanying each hacker throughout their application. Through our brand we communicate our promise to hackers and to ourselves; we want everyone to dream freely and be able to build what they want to.
I created a paper texture in Clip Studio Paint that could be scaled differently depending on the level of detail we wanted. The development team applied these textures to whenever the illustrations were in .svg or .json format.
The colours of 2021 was created to be approachable, dreamy, and overall cohesive. I chose mostly natural colours with a lot of saturation. The combination of these colours help keep them memorable and pretty.
Often we create a secondary brand, reusing elements from date launch, to differentiate hacker apps campaign and assets from date launch. However, the message and tone from date launch still carry over; we should visually convey a mix of what people know us as, and how we want to be known. We want to focus on what is special about this year and emphasize that.
Some of the experience considerations were avoiding chronological or concepts that require the hackers to remember something; hackers often leave and come back for long periods of time.
Hack the North has an active presence on Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter. The marketing team works hard to make content calendars and campaigns so we're informed well in advance what kind of assets we'll have to make.
