FREETAIL HACKERS
Branding Design | Web Design | Graphic Design
Freetail Hackers is an organization focused on bringing students who are passionate about technology together to build cool tech, learn new skills, and become involved in the hackathon and tech communities. We put on HackTX, an annual hackathon that brings students from all over the country to build new technology.
End of spring semester of freshman year, I joined Freetail Hackers, an organization that runs and organizes hackathons. These hackathons are friendly competitions intended for computer science majors (or anyone interested) to practice their coding skills. I worked on the Creative Team as an organizer throughout summer until the end of the fall semester of my sophomore year. At of the beginning of 2020, I moved up to become Freetail's Creative Director, continuing to design assets for the organization, but also managing a small group of designers. These assets include branding, marketing graphics, and merchandise (T-shirts, hoodies, badges, stickers, etc). Our biggest event is our annual HackTX, which hosts around 700-900 attendees each year.
Freetail has been one of my favorite organizations I've joined, as well as one of my favorite college experiences. I work alongside dedicated people who all enjoy creating these amazing experiences for our attendees. You can learn more about Freetail and its team from our website, freetailhackers.com, featured in the UIUX section.
Websites I worked on during my time as Creative Director.
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Leaphacks
First hackathon as Creative Director. In-person event at Capital Factory empowering start-ups.
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Summerhacks
Freetail’s first ever virtual hackathon over the summer, which lasted for 3 months.
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HackTX 2020
Our annual event, hosted virtually for the first time. Over 1000 applicants nationwide.
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Learn-a-thon
First spring hackathon of 2021 with new creative team members. Focused on learning.
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Change-a-thon
Second spring hackathon of 2021, focused on helping improve mental health in tech.
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HackTX 2021
HackTX 2021 was our big event in-person, during our first semester “back” from the pandemic.
One of my biggest goals as Creative Director was to implement more eye-catching and interactive websites. Especially for HackTX 2020, the creative team worked on creating smooth gifs on Adobe After Effects.
Gifs such as this spacecowboy can be seen throughout HackTX 2020’s horizontal scroll website (talked about in the UX section of this portfolio) as well as all HackTX 2020 virtual ads and branding. Most of our hackathons embrace graphics and visual aesthetics to attract applicants.
This dolphin is another gif created for our first ever virtual hackathon, Summerhacks. We went for an old-school video-game summer vibe, hoping to create a comforting and fun feel to get people motivated and excited to code and build projects during quarantine.
All the gifs were done in photoshop, and simulated pixel art. In this hackathon and the others, I oversaw the creative team in making cohesive graphics to match the site, merch, and advertisements.
The merch (aka swag) pictured above are all designed by the creative team. HackTX 2020, HackTX 2019, and Leaphacks all had fun t-shirts and stickers that we handed out (or shipped for 2020) at the events.
