The Global hack - Brand Manual

Client
The Global Hack

Industry
Startup
Education

What we did?
Branding
Visual identity
UI/UX

Who did it?
Brand Manual
Garage48
Mooncascade

“Do you still remember the covid crisis from 2020?” It’s a question we all long to hear. For now though, it is still very much a reality.
On the bright side, as is often the case with crises, this one too serves as a catalyst for new ideas and breakthroughs. But with the world in lockdown, it’s difficult to get these ideas out of peoples’ minds and into the world. So the global hackathon was born.

It started here in Estonia when a team of start-up enthusiasts organised a small yet influential fully virtual hackathon in just under 6 hours. It ignited the ambition to help the world come together and create solutions during a time when most people had very little control over what was happening around them. This first ad-hoc event resulted in an abundance of ideas and planted a seed to replicate it on a global scale.

The preparation took a month and involved multiple partners from around the world. Brand Manual, Garage48 and Mooncascade came together to build the website and get the word out. This visionary project took the effort of 19 organising partners, 13 global partners and 22 supporting partners to pull it off. The event hosted separate tracks for a variety of subjects from arts and media to crisis response and mental health. Mentors like IDEO’s Executive Design Director Mitch Sinclair, Udacity CEO Sebastian Thurn and legendary chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov joined the effort to innovate and guide participants under these unprecedented circumstances.

With the world in turmoil, there was no time to waste. Everything had to come together at the same time – event planning, technology, identity, web platform. Right from the start we knew, we had to adopt a more fluid and organic process, which also informed the design. We kept it simple, yet characterful with geometric shapes representing individual topical hacking tracks. This toolbox of shapes enabled a vast group of people to use, re-use and expand on the identity in a consistent way across all sorts of mediums.

In the end, the hackathon worked beautifully. 12 000 people from over 100 countries took part in the event. They managed to produce ~500 concepts for solutions how to alleviate the crisis and how to shape the world once we come out on the other side of this mess.

The Global Hack was broadly covered and praised by world media outlets – CNN, the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, and Forbes to name a few. In the wake of its success the brand was registered as a trademark to keep organising these global hackathons that boost innovation on a scale which previously had seemed implausible. All’s well that ends well we suppose.