Hackathon

3 hours at Ironhack

Featured Project

HACKATHON:
3 hours at Ironhack

Prior to the kickoff of the Final project during the Ironhack bootcamp, I was given an opportunity to take part in a 3-hour in-house Hackathon with webdevs.

It was definitely a useful experience to get a glance at the interaction with the folks who are going to bring our designs to life.

I already knew that for every 1 hour of designer work, typically webdev specialists need 5 to 8 respective hours to code, so the challenge is to evaluate the capacity of the coding team and set achievable goals. That for me personally meant to leave behind all my so-beloved micro interactions and animations.

The brief that was handed to us, was to create a landing page for men getting ready to become fathers.

Quick survey of the men at Ironhack Miami campus let us know that young men would not be prepared for fatherhood, and most probably would feel frustrated and anxious about this fact. The reason is that they don’t know if they are able to materially provide for the young family, if the baby can get all the necessary medical treatment and the men expressed the feeling that they did not feel prepared for fatherhood mentally.

With this data at hand, there was no time to lose. I started creating the mood.

The parenting is an exciting news and a new page in people’s lives, so we believed that the color palette should be manly, and at the same time encouraging, reassuring, earthy.

A few preceding weeks one of my biggest struggles was coming up with color palettes that would provide enough contract to comply with ADA requirements. It was surprising to me that the colors I picked for this web page, were compliant right away. It may be an overshare, could not be more proud of myself at that moment because weeks of prior hard work have started to show signs of a feel for color.

Even though we did not win the competition, since there were obviously much more refined projects competing with us, it was a great opportunity to test level of skill and learn something new in a high-paced stressful situation.

Nobody walks away without anything from the events like this: contestants get either prizes, or valuable experience that makes us better.