Hackathon 2019.1 Branding

Role: Designer and Videographer
Date: May - June 2019
Collaborators: Josh Thayer and Patrick Dullea
Client: Imprivata (Lexington, MA)

“Hackathon 2019.1 is a fun, collaborative event where colleagues create cool new ideas to help solve real problems. Work on that project you’ve always been thinking of!”

I worked on the Web & Creative team in the Marketing department at Imprivata from January - June 2019. In my last two months there, I helped develop branding for an internal hackathon event in the Engineering department. Our Hackathon committee consisted of 10 people from all different departments—engineering, IT, HR, marketing—and we all came together once a week to put together this fantastic two-day event.

Branding elements that I created/helped create include: promotional posters, stickers, email banners, web buttons, conference room screens, and desktop backgrounds.

Along with marketing assets, I also planned and helped shoot a video capturing the event.

Theme

The theme we chose for this year’s hackathon was hats! The idea is that while we all wear many hats at work, you can pick any hat to wear at Hackathon. We wanted to encourage people from all departments to participate and to go out of their comfort zone. The theme aims to inspire an environment of fun, trying new things, and working on new ideas.

We had two main slogans: “What hat will you wear?” and “Pick a hat and bring your skills.” The first was used in teaser campaigns, and the latter was used to drum up excitement about the event and encourage people to sign up. Josh Thayer created the logo <iH/> to bring in aspects of code and appeal to the intended audience.

Marketing Assets

The promotional posters each included skill-based copy that linked each of the hats with valuable skills. For example, the firefighter hat is for someone who is always putting out fires in their work and quickly solving problems as they arise. The doctor and nurse hats relate to Imprivata as a healthcare IT security company, and others, like the Stormtrooper helmet, were just for fun.

I designed a set of 12 different hat stickers and ordered 500 of them for in-house promotion one week before the event. I personally distributed them to everyone in the company’s desks (about 300 people) along with a reminder notecard, and scattered the remaining 200 stickers on conference room tables, in the kitchen, at reception, and in other common spaces. People seemed to really enjoy them! The stickers sparked a lot of new talk about the event, and many people asked me questions about signing up/joining a team when I was going around.

Other marketing assets included promotional screens for the conference rooms, desktop log-in screens for all company computers, and email banners for the Confluence sign-up page and promotional event emails.

Videography

Josh, Pat, and I planned out a vision for the video we wanted to shoot and made a plan for shooting several days in advance.

The video would be used for two purposes: first, it was to be presented on the day of the awards (one week after the event) to remind participants of the event and to inspire others to participate next time, and second, it was to be used for HR and recruiting purposes on the website to showcase a company event.

Pat and I each had our own camera to shoot the opening presentation, individual interviews, following around various hackathon teams, and final demonstrations. Pat put together the clips and edited the video using Adobe Premiere.