I was asked to redesign the logo of a hackathon based in Copenhagen. I was given the current logo as an example. It portrays the sails of a ship, with the lines on the left representing the water of the harbour. I was also sent a traditional picture of a Copenhagen harbour. The client was open to exploring any ideas.

I was keen on keeping a sailboat as the central element. I started by working on a black-and-white version to stay in-line with the original logo, and in order to focus on the composition first.

I wanted to keep the geometric style of the original as well, as clean lines add to the "modern" feel of a tech event, but I ended up also adding a few more doodle-style elements in order to make it feel softer and more welcoming. I also rounded the bottom of the sails a bit to give them more volume.

Since this was to be a hackathon logo, I felt the need to add a computer-science-related element, and I sent the client a few versions to see what they thought of this first iteration. The idea was that a section of the sail was somehow corrupted/incomplete. I wasn't particularly happy with the ones with text; the dashed border version was simpler and had a doodle-like quality that I liked.

For the text, I made use of a clean sans-serif font and increased the letter-spacing as a simple way to make the text more prominent and modern.

The client was happy with this, and asked if I had tried experimenting with different colours. I tried combining the various vibrant colours from the Copenhagen harbour picture they had sent me. Below was the initial attempt at colouring. I found the process of finding the right colours challenging, and I wasn't happy with the initial colours as they weren't inviting, didn't compliment each other, and were probably not very printer-friendly. The client agreed with this and also asked if I could try alternating the colours amongst the sail sections.

What is more, since the logo was to be used for stickers, now that I knew the shape of the logo's content, I was able to add a double-circular border.

I fiddled with the colours a bit more, finding a yellow that was fun and matched well with the blue-grey. I ended up keeping the dashed sail section as the computer-related element; it's quite abstract, but keeping the hackathon's name as the only text on the logo helped emphasise it.

Here is the final logo in use on the Facebook page, stickers, and t-shirts of the 2017 & 2018 edition of the hackathon: