I designed a logo for a project of mine that took a unique spin on the GitHub Octocat mascot. I entered it into a hackathon challenge and it was picked as the best overall design. GitHub Education has hosted this design competition many times for various hackathons. At the MenloHacks hackathon a couple weekends ago, my group and I built Execute Order 66, a Chrome extension that automatically censors vulgar language in GitHub repos.

Design Process

I took inspiration from the name of our Chrome Extension: Execute Order 66. For those out there who are not Star Wars fans, Execute Order 66 was the directive that commanded the assassination of all the Jedi. Similarly, our extension orders the destruction of all curse words in your repositories.
It was easy decision to include the Octocat mascot in my design since we were creating a GitHub developer tool. Because of the dark nature of the phrase “Execute Order 66,” I felt that the overall design should reflect this. As a result, I designed with largely a black color palette and a Sith lightsaber to add a red highlight. For the background, I used the iconic “light speed” design from Star Wars.

Overall, I was pretty happy with my design. For one, because this was our second project, I had to design this logo in about 10 minutes. Secondly, I got a lot of exposure for it on Twitter! It was nice to know that people out there appreciated my design. It strengthened my confidence in my design skills and I’m beginning to now identify as a designer as well as a programmer. If I were to do this logo again, I would increase the resolution of my design. It’s a little low resolution, but it’s not noticeable on the Chrome app store. Feel free to download the Chrome Extension.

Competition Results

Below are screenshots and links of the various Twitter announcements. About 15 people “liked” my design and I even got a couple retweets!
GitHub Education Announcement

Major League Hacking Shoutout

My Original Tweet

Posted in Design with Hackathon, Graphic Design