The third annual UGA hack-a-thon, UGA Hacks, was recently held on campus with involvement from School of Art graphic design students. This student-organized event was an opportunity to learn about innovative technology and collaborate with teams from other disciplines and institutions.The first UGA Hacks event in 2016 was founded by a group of students including graphic design senior Paul Hwang. For this year's event, graphic design senior D.J. Bradford worked on a team of student organizers to plan and coordinate everything from workshops and logistics to meals and branding. Bradford designed the event identity and its various applications including the website, tshirts and various promotional materials. 

Hackathons are design sprint events that bring together computer programmers and others involved in the software development process to collaborate intensively on projects for a set amount of time in a shared space with a goal of creating new concepts for hardware, programs, games, or apps. The 3-day UGA event was held February 9–11 at the ThincUGA studios downtown, was was free and open to all students, and included attendees from UGA, Georgia State and Georgia Tech. Most participants are focusing their studies in computer science, but there were also attendees studying marketing, engineering or other disciplines who were interested in collaborating with developers to gain exposure to new tools and processes. 

The intention of Bradford’s visual identity and related promotional materials was to encourage event participation, especially focusing on students who are unfamiliar with the hackathon concept. In designing the brand, Bradford aimed to create a mark that conveyed the actual activity of a hackathon: group collaboration in a workspace. The four dots of the “H” logo represent a team of people while the crossbar represents the table where they collaborate, workshop and brainstorm. Bradford commented that he “chose a primarily black and white color scheme to emphasize the content rather than the aesthetics, with red accents creating the majority of the visual interest and highlighting the most important information. These decisions fit the goals for this year’s campaign to focus on the basics of communicating what a hackathon is in order to better engage and educate students who had never attended such an event."