We at SDSLabs (Software Development Section), a student-run technical group of IIT Roorkee, constantly try to promote innovation and foster technical activities in the campus.

Syntax Error is one step towards this. It’s a 36-hour campus-level hackathon where students come up in teams and work together to build some amazing applications from scratch. The main aim of this event is to indulge the freshers and tech enthusiasts of the campus to work together and learn from each other.

<aside> 🌐 Visit Website: https://hackathon.sdslabs.co/

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Organizing the event

As the organizers of this hackathon, our focus was to get more and more enthusiastic people to participate. In the course of the event, we had to ensure the following things were performed smoothly:

• Promoting the event on the campus to generate more and more awareness among the people.
• Conveying general information regarding the hackathon like prizes to be won, who can participate, how to form teams, event duration, etc.
• Providing a platform to register in teams.
• Conducting the hackathon and keeping the participants charged up by a dose of snacks, coffee and most importantly guiding them as they work.
• Announcing the results and giving away prizes.

The Design Part

In the previous versions of Syntax Error, It had a strong brand identity which did justice to its legacy. But we realized that it has now gotten outdated with time and we need a rebrand. Thus to celebrate he 10 year milestone of syntax error we gave it a brand revamp.

This time, we were planning to go bigger by including sponsored prizes and alum tracks as well. This was the right time where we could recreate a visual language to carry everything together. What we needed was to promote Syntax Error using a modern brand identity.

Branding

The art and science of defining and differentiating yourself to the public.

We wanted a brand identity that was not just about pretty design elements, but the more important thing was to convey the values associated with it. The values chosen later helped us to stick the brand components in a direction.