For this event, we put a bit more effort into the design materials
(and there's still some to come, with new t-shirt designs, badges, and
such). If you're one of the people who care about organizing
hackathons and making them successful, here's a little bit of
additional background.
Here are a couple of design changes we made for this:
* New hackathon visual identity. We're still very much playing with
different concepts, but here are a couple of logo variants:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Wikimedia_Hackathon_San_Francisc…
Our goal here was to harmonize the Wikipedia/Wikimedia visual identity
into a single design that could represent technical events well going
forward. We ended up with the hexagon design because we felt it can
represent technical work and collaboration (connotations with
chemistry, beehives, creative play) without resorting to the highly
mechanical gears/rocketry/lightning/wrenches imagery that's often
used.
The simple puzzle piece seemed like the least obnoxious way to
incorporate reference to Wikipedia. We wanted to do that, because the
Wikimedia-centric design of past events is great from an insider
perspective, but if we're trying to bring in new people, we'd like to
try some new ideas by connecting with the familiar WP brand.
We're going to use this for the SF event, but I'm very much open to
further iteration for future WMF events. And obviously anyone
organizing these kinds of events can make up a new design, but I hope
you'll find these ones appealing.
* Featuring community profiles. Still mostly a placeholder with two
staffers being featured, but hopefully we can expand on this. The
point of this is, again, to introduce human beings into the design in
a way that helps people understand that there's a community for them
to meet and become part of.
Hope you like it, and if you see any obvious room for improvement (I'm
sure the HTML/CSS could use some love), be bold :). Big thanks to
Heather Walls for working on this for us.
Many thanks,
Erik
--
Erik Möller
VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation
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