Team Spotlight: Design
Interview with: Caitlin Wang, Design Team Lead
Caitlin Wang is a 4th year computer science major and interaction design minor at Northeastern University. She is currently on her 2nd co-op at Upstatement, a digital design studio in Boston. When she’s not designing beautiful content for HackBeanpot, you can either find her exploring the outdoors or pursuing a variety of her artistic interests, including 📸 film photography and painting 🎨.
Meet the Design team!
What does the Design team do?
The Design team is a unique team because it overlaps with every other team at HackBeanpot. Members on our team work directly with other teams to incorporate HackBeanpot’s visual brand into any deliverables, such as our sponsorship packet, social posts, outreach materials, and website wireframes. We also focus on the event experience from the different perspectives of all the people involved: attendees, sponsors, mentors, volunteers, etc.
Finally, we facilitate a bunch of different activities with the core team to tease out any ideas/solutions and get everyone using their design thinking skills!
Tell us about Design’s work for HackBeanpot 2019.
Last year, the Design team had a big focus on re-branding Hackbeanpot. We wanted to create a visual brand that represented our core team values. Our team of three spent a lot of time with the rest of the organization figuring out what those values were, and a lot of thought went into the brand elements we wanted to use: the typeface, colors, logo, etc. In the end, we finished designing a cohesive brand for HackBeanpot that we were able to apply to any deliverables and event collateral!
How has the Design team changed since last year?
This year the design team has five people, and each member (apart from myself) is on another team, either Sponsorship, Outreach, Social, or Tech. They are responsible for bridging the gap between Design and their other team that may need design work from us. For example, Sindhu, our Design x Tech member, is in charge of designing anything the Tech team may need (ex. website designs). So far this team structure has been pretty successful — members are able to feel a greater sense of ownership over their work and share any important context behind it.
What is Design’s vision for HackBeanpot 2020?
One of our big goals is to figure out how to take the branding work we did last year and build on top of it in order to distinguish HackBeanpot 2020 from HackBeanpot 2019. To help with that, we’ve decided to introduce a theme for the event! The theme acts as a guiding idea to help inspire us, represent our organization’s goals for the event, and offer a unique HackBeanpot experience year to year.
This year our theme is Sprout 🌱, a representation of growth in new experiences and relationships (and a nod to our sustainability initiatives as well ♻️). With this theme in mind, we’ve created a visual system that we’ve been working to incorporate in all our designs.
We’ve been using a really useful tool called Figma for nearly all of our designs! Figma helps us build a library for all the different elements of our brand, which makes it really easy to achieve visual consistency across our designs.
Another goal of ours has been to focus on “user” experience (UX). Last year we focused on enhancing the attendee experience, and this year we want to pay closer attention to the sponsor, mentor, and judge experience as well. We’re working on providing the rest of the team with the tools they need to always keep UX at the forefront of their minds!
What is your favorite part of the design team?
I love that our team gets to help shape people’s first experience with HackBeanpot. As the Design team, we’re able to visually showcase what HackBeanpot is all about and get people excited about attending! Also, everyone on the team is very passionate about art and design. It’s fun to be able to share that creativity among ourselves and create things for an event we love.
