HackDuke is Duke's annual hackathon, bringing over 500 students nationwide together to hack for social good on one of four tracks: Education, Health & Wellness, Energy & Environment, and Inequality.

As design team lead, I worked with other students on new designs for HackDuke 2017.

This year we wanted to create a visual theme to center our designs on, after last year's design overhaul. Ideally, the theme would be relevant to HackDuke's four tracks, as every track has a different cat mascot, as well as to tech as a whole.

Considering HackDuke's participants would be very familiar with technology-related topics, I sketched out a role playing game (RPG) theme. The basic classes were well matched with the four tracks and the protagonists are always fighting for good, which went along with HackDuke's mission of social good. I sketched the Education cat as a wizard, Inequality as a rogue, Health & Wellness as a cleric, Energy & Environment as an archer, and the main HackDuke cat as a warrior, writing notes about their perceived personalities to inspire their pose.

Our team decided to use RPG as our final theme and split the cat mascots accordingly, to be used on stickers and large banners for the space. I worked on the Education cat mascot, bringing in the round glasses and light purple used in last year's Education cat, as well as an additional sticker of the main HackDuke cat.

I also worked on the design for our T-shirts, given to all participants, mentors, sponsors, volunteers, and organizers. My design went through various iterations thanks to team feedback, and one of my teammates added the lowpoly design to the cat for the final design. The lineart symbols (potion, leaf, etc) were also used on the back of the organizer-exclusive sweatshirts.