Shellhacks 2026
ShellHacks is Florida’s largest hackathon, bringing together over 1,500 hackers. For the event, I led the end-to-end UX/UI design of both the public-facing website with my teammate Emely and the hacker dashboard, working alongside a 40+ person team to bring the platform from concept to launch. In addition to the digital product, I designed the event merchandise, including shirts, stickers, and promotional posters.
See you at Shellhacks!
Every year Shellhacks introduces a new theme, which this year was Retro and Robots. I spent a lot of time focusing on the backend UI which needed an overhaul from previous years.
ShellHacks hacker dashboard Figma file
Designing the assets & theme
Designing the robots were incredibly fun, especially viewing older models of robots out there. The process started in Procreate in finding inspo and sketching some robots out. I then moved to illustrator to focus on the robots themselves, and big designs for the website.
Lots of happy hackers...
Beyond the UI and pixel perfection, seeing hundreds of hackers actually use what we built made all the late nights worth it! Posting their swag and wins was an awesome thing to see.
Takeaways
Accepting some things were nice-to-haves, but had low utility rates: Originally, we had the idea to put profile photo selections and pop down banners for waves, but realized the utility for it would be rather low, causing us to focus on priorities only.
Collaboration is everything: Co-leading design alongside dev teams meant wearing multiple hats, iterating fast on Figma so we could get our website ready for MLH in time.
Having a design system matters: Embracing the Retro & Robot theme gave us room to bring visual charm and character into digital UI elements without sacrificing clarity into our theme.
