Last week we shared our first 4 tips for designers about hackathons. In the following article, we are going to reveal the remaining 4 secrets to win!

5. Handling the handover

The ultimate design thinking phrase “Show don’t tell” plays an important role here. If you want to create stunning UI animations: build the prototype, don’t leave your developer fellows hanging.

Tools to use:

• Use a handover tool such as Zeplin, Avocode or InVision Inspect. Here is a great article about how to stay organized: https://www.netguru.com/blog/zeplin-how-to-handle-the-handover-process-like-a-pro
• Use a prototyping tool for high fidelity animations. InVision Studio, Principle and Framer X are leading the game. Here is my previous article showcasing Principle in our design process: https://medium.muz.li/drops-an-instant-payment-platform-ux-ui-case-study-f09dfe6ea186

6. Use your quick wins

Simplify branding

Usually it isn’t necessary at hackathons to create a kickass branding for your hack. For branding I would suggest you stay as simple as possible because it’s not the right time to create that amazing logo-metaphor.

For colours, you can find amazing inspirations at the links below. If you are working on a challenge provided by an exact company/bank/etc. then use their identity! If there is no brand guideline available, improvise! Use a color picker tool or find secondary colors using the tools at the following links:

Tools to use:

• Coolors
• Adobe Color
• Color picker tools like Classic Color Meter

UI kits

Using UI kits is a very time efficient way of trying out different layouts and techniques and its really accelerate your design workflow. UI8 is a great online marketplace for UI designers where you can find icons, mobile and web resources. It’s important that you shouldn’t copy and paste but use patterns and ideas instead.

Use your existing patterns:

I think it’s okay to reuse even code components for the UI part of your hack. Nobody will judge you if you copied that navigation bar from your previous app! It’s better focusing on the solution and not on the UI glitches.

7. Pitch time!

Storytelling is more important than ever if you want to fight against the very low attention span of your fellow audience. It’s very important to adapt our story to different communication channels and make it our competitive advantage. I’ve heard hundreds of pitches and the best ones are always convince the audience with incredible and emotional stories.

Books to read:

• Carmine Gallo: The storyteller’s secret
• Nancy Duarte: Slideology

+1 Secret sauce (video, Prezi)

Our secret sauce to every hackathon is a strong and dynamic teaser video and also a live or recorded demo. It’s really important to make the demo as the highlight of your pitch and build an organized content around it.

For creating kickass custom teasers, I would recommend you to use After Effects like we did in our demo but there is also Rotato which lets you create animations in minutes without any knowledge of 3d.

We also like to use Prezi for the presentations because it gives the audience a sense of overview without the boring slides that separate the different sections. Also, inserting a video is very smooth and your whole demo is in motion.

We really hope that we could help by sharing our pro-tips based on our experiences. Check out my dribbble profile to see some of my works and feel free to reach out to me in case of any questions arising! :)