Treehacks Designs
Overview
My frosh fall, Grace Wang and I designed the entire brand for TreeHacks, Stanford's intercollegiate hackathon and one of the largest in the world, sponsored by Google, NVIDIA, Tesla, OpenAI, Perplexity, Anthropic, Asus, and Zoom.
We drew basically everything a hacker touched that weekend: the key art, wallpapers and social graphics, tote bags, t-shirts, stickers, playing cards, phone wallets, PCB lanyards, venue signage, even the reserved-seat cards in the keynote hall.
It started with a night sky over the redwoods
The theme we landed on was a launch. A rocket climbing out of a silhouetted treeline into a sky full of stars and planets, Hoover Tower somewhere below. Once we had that image, every other decision got easier. A sticker, a stage slide, and a seat card all looked like the same universe because they all pulled from the same night sky.
The logo got the same treatment. A rocket in a circular badge, redrawn until it held up at lanyard size.
Nothing survived its first draft
Our Figma pages are full of dead versions: rows of logo marks before the final one, wallpaper colorways side by side, five tote illustrations before the one that got printed, a full grid of sticker color tests. We pinned every version next to the last one so we could tell if it was getting better or just different.
The playing cards took the longest. Twelve court cards, each jack, queen, and king its own illustration, plus a custom back. And you can't patch a printed deck. Once the card stock is ordered, that's it.
The merch had to outlive the weekend
The bar for every physical piece: would someone still use this after Sunday? A tote you actually carry to class, a deck you actually play with, stickers that end up on water bottles, phone wallets, and PCB lanyards that double as a hardware badge. Branding an event this size mostly means making a hundred small objects that keep advertising it months later.
Then the weekend arrived
Our track signage lined the entrance and the check-in tables ran under our balloons. At some point after midnight, a humanoid robot was fencing hackers with lightsabers in front of the building. The brand had to hold up in print, projection, daylight, and stage lighting, and it did.
Sam Altman spoke in front of our slide
The keynote was Sam Altman, interviewed on stage with our key art projected behind him. Same rocket and night sky from the stickers, scaled up to auditorium size. The reserved seats down front had our seat cards printed on them, one for Sam Altman, one for Garry Tan. He sat in a chair with our design on it. That was a weird thing to see.
Thank you, Rachel, Hannah, and Thijs
TreeHacks only happens because a small team spends a year making it happen. Rachel, Hannah, and Thijs, the co-directors my year, trusted two freshmen with the entire visual identity of the event and backed every weird idea we brought them. This project was as fun as it looks because of them.
