Abel Paguyo II

Swamphacks is a 36-hour collegiate hackathon hosted at the University of Florida. I had the opportunity to serve on the Organizing Team as Design Director, all while knowing nothing about design.

"Does this look good?"

How does someone like me, who knows nothing about design, get to be someone as Design Director for one of the premiere collegiate hackathons in the southeast region? In short, I like to believe I have been growing a discerning eye on whether something "looked good or not," and I believe I started growing this from working on videography. The lead organizer, who was a close friend, believed that was actually a crucial skill to define a great design director, and offered me the position. Given an opportunity to branch out into an unknown world of "design," I said "sure, why not."

SHIV: A hackathon to set itself apart from the rest

One of my main projects as Design Director was to work closely with the Head Organizers and Tech Director on developing the main website. To give some context on the objective, Swamphacks was relatively new as UF's collegiate hackathon, as well as hackathons being generally at the peak of it's popularity. Technically the 4th iteration of Swamphacks, we chased after the idea of setting ourselves apart from previous Swamphack generations, as well as other collegiate hackathons. I'm gonna fast forward a bit since my good friend and Head Organizer, Andrew Zhang, wrote about it already. If you want to know the self-fabricated lore about Swamphacks we created, please give it a look through.

My predecessor and filling in holes

All while we were bouncing ideas back and forth for the website, I had to do my own personal work of learning how to illustrate and design visuals in the first place. Fortunately I had some experience in videography of modifying small visuals, but nothing on the caliber of creating visuals out of thin air. I had no lead except to find an example from the previous generation's organizer and designer, Takashi Wickes. All of his creations and visuals were created on Adobe Illustrator, and so I bootcamped myself on how to use Adobe Illustrator as well. I'm going to go on a fanboy mode, but after taking a quick glance of what Takashi made for the previous generation, there was no need for me to attempt to distinguish myself from him, but instead found it more appropriate to build on top of what he has already established as the foundation. Plus, his self-made visuals and visions were just so inspiring by the way, being somebody who has never designed on Illustrator, my mindset immediately targeted the idea of being "Takashi Jr." I've never met Takashi until recently, but I could only hope to say I was mentored by him, indirectly through his design.

He left a Google Drive of all his art assets, this being one of the many, it's just so nice to look at

I found nothing wrong with his perfect logo, and instead started a trend of simply changing the color scheme to diffentiate between the generations of Swamphacks

Lore of Swamphacks

If you haven't read the Medium article that explains how we came up with a theme of Swamphacks, I'll just briefly summarize instead. In order to set ourselves apart, we picked a focus of charging Swamphacks with a poem that loosely invites everyone and their ambitions. Also, we wanted to break off from the website trend of vertical walk-through websites that most if not all hackathons had. Andrew wrote a poem, I have no idea when he came up with it, but he showed it to me, not expecting anything to come out of it, but I saw something else in the poem, and the best way to share that vision was through an illustration.

A super fast vision requires a super fast illustration, so he's a rough draft

I showed it to Andrew, and he actually found it appropriate. So I ran with another draft

Eventually I ran it through Illustrator, and it took quite a while actually, but I was proud of it for some reason after the point of completion

"A child again, a new friend, an innovator"

With the ambigious floating island we all liked as the centerpiece, we also ran the idea of turning the website as an interactive storybook in order to emulate a feeling of "When I was a child..." that started off the poem. We put two and two together real quick, and we found an unexpected recipe we were happy with.

Eventually I ran it through Illustrator, and it took quite a while actually, but I was proud of it for some reason after the point of completion

Instead of scrolling down vertically, one would have to navigate through the storybook, and all while putting in details for registration at the same time. Each page turn offered another illustration (that I had to do so that was more practice for me) as well as important details about the hackathon. Feel free to find the floating island here.

Merchandise, Stickers, and Unreleased Concepts

Together with the Marketing Director, there was never a day where we didnt say "wouldn't it be cool if Swamphacks had _______?" And I almost always impulsively followed up and drew up some of these ideas at times. Here are some of them.

Had some fun experimenting and exploring banner styles all while keeping engagement with applicants through frequent banner changes

Some of these premiered as stickers. The four animals were created and personified from our sponsorship structure (Dragonfly Sponsor all the way to Gator Sponsor), and naturally became likable mascots in the Swamphacks "world."

Recap + Team

Throughout the weekend of the hackathon, I was doubling down as a volunteer on top of catching some of the moments on camera. And then I challenged myself to edit and publish a video all before the closing ceremony. "If the hackers are staying up, then I'm also staying up."

The entire organizing team for Swamphacks IV after a successful weekend. We're all legends individually for making it this far. (Because the next day was Monday)

Hackathon // Organizing Team

Swamphacks