AI ATL

Role
Director of Design, Chief Designer

Team
4 Designers

Problem

How do you present the possibility of infinite possibilities? How do you tie the abstractness of *everything at once* to a physical location?

AI ATL is a brand new hackathon from Startup Exchange with a focus on generative machine learning technologies. After a burst of innovation in 2023, we and our partners wanted to build a hackathon to encourage students to buckle down and build something. It can be overwhelming when you can build anything, and a time limit + sponsored tracks can help provide the constraints that get you started.

We faced a number of challenges when designing AI ATL. This was my first project as Director of Design, with a brand new design team formed asynchronously over the summer. In addition, the whole org was under the pressure of putting together three massive events for the fall, as well as expanding Startup Exchange to campuses nationwide.

Solution

The org and our partners agree: the AI ATL brand is powerful and represents the unique infinity of possibilities within this space. It represents not only the broadness of ideas but the process of refining them into sharp, focused products. AI ATL is shaping up to be one of our best events yet.

In addition, AI ATL represents a world-class team of student designers, with a highly efficient, rapidly moving production pipeline.

Process

User Research

From ImmerseGT, we learned several lessons:

1. Hit the ground running — Make sure everything is ready ahead of time

2. Advertise early and broadly — Get the word out there and don't underestimate digital platforms, so you can reach a huge audience.

3. Don't be afraid to experiment — Brainstorm from a wide range of perspectives so that you can combine the best elements and make intelligent decisions

4. Avoid oversimplifying — To stand out, a brand has to do more than look nice.

5. Get Feedback often — Make sure that you're getting responses to your designs from across the org at every stage of the design cycle. Trust your instincts, but trust the research too.

6. Don't use purple. Everything in tech is purple now. People don't want purple. :(

Startup Exchange maintains a strong practice of observing, interviewing, and conducting feedback cycles in both the local and nationwide student startup communities. For AI ATL, we took in internal and external feedback from ImmerseGT, advice from our partners and peers, and surveyed digital communities.

Results

From a design perspective, we received feedback that the ImmerseGT brand was strong, but arguably too simple. Participants felt that the sheer presence of it in the venue and the complexity of our design assets helped build a strong presence for the brand, but it may not do that on its own. In addition, while the tie-in to the campanile was a cool easter egg, without knowing this detail it didn't feel as connected to our home at Georgia Tech or Atlanta.

Prototypes

I started by putting together a wide range of concepts, experimenting far more than I had with ImmerseGT.

For feedback, I put these pitches up as a contest (with names!) and tried to make it fun and engaging for Startup Exchange members to participate in the ideation process. This was particularly fun since we doubled in size over the summer.

Overall, the clear favorites were Dynamic and Northern Lights, almost for opposite reasons.

Northern Lights felt very "ATL", but a common criticism was its lack of color. The pure grayscale made it feel lifeless.

Dynamic was popular for how poppy and fun it was, and how well its adaptivity fed into the theme. However, it was very bright, and very bold, and we wondered if it would be a good fit for an event where our participants ideas were meant to be in focus.

One of our designers was experimenting with patterns and visuals on another project, and asked me to help make the designs feel more "random". I realized its applications here, and we worked together to create this visual:

And at the same time, I had been iterating on logomark concepts from Northern Lights. The 3D logo was extremely popular, and our team wanted to see variants in different proportions.

When these two visions came together, we realize we struck gold.

The generated shapes melded perfectly with the sharpness of the logo and the light bars. It produced a brand that felt both infinite and focus. It didn't take long for this one brand slide to get passed around and approved by all the stakeholders.

One final part of the process, however, was related to organizational changes. Marketing and Design, previously one division, had split in two. Having recognized from other divisions that I needed to speed up the "Brand → Deck" process, as well as setting up a system for my new design team to take the lead on future projects, I set up a Branding Kit pipeline. This process would go from Pitch → Assets in record time, and allow even non-designers at SX to quickly produce documents that matched the brand of an event.

Final Product

Reflection

AI ATL is still coming up, so I'm still learning a lot.

Some of the things I'm really happy about:

• AI ATL is probably our best brand yet. I'm really happy with the vibe we produced and think we built our most unique and visually striking brand yet. (and we avoided the dreaded purple).

• This was the first time we worked with another team on the website, and I think we did a great job of managing work and collaboration across our groups

• The Branding Kit pipeline has made itself worthwhile already, as in the span of one week we were able to translate 3 selected pitches across different projects into full design kits.

But we learned a lot of lessons:

• Again, delegate! I was worried about pushing too much work onto brand new team members—but these are talented designers who can take on the challenge! I've managed to step back and let our new members take on more work as we near the finish line!

• Communicate often! I used to hate meetings, and I still do—but SX is now 80 members strong, and AI ATL requires a lot of teams to work together to make it happen. Designers can't hole up in one place and produce finished output. Luckily, I realized early on I needed to involve the whole org in this process, because our work represents all of Startup Exchange.

If AI ATL sounds at all interesting to you, as a participant, or as a sponsor, don't hesitate to reach out! You can also learn more at aiatl.io!