A Social Community for Plant Parents.

DubHacks is a tech and entrepreneurship non-profit in Seattle run by students at the University of Washington. DubHacks '21 is the premier university-level hackathon in the Pacific Northwest. Teams have 24 hours to ideate, iterate, and develop a prototype to pitch to a group of expert judges.

For DubHacks 2021, I teamed up with Faith Ong (Design) and Yash Mishra (Computer Science). We first identified our strengths as a team, with Faith becoming the interaction designer, Yash becoming our lead developer, and myself taking on a more graphic design and videography-oriented role. Over the course of 24 hours, we worked to create a product aimed at fostering social connection in the post-pandemic era.

After realizing that plant parenting was a commonality among my team and our peers, I pitched LeafBook as an idea. We discussed some other ideas but eventually decided as a team to build LeafBook. We wanted LeafBook to reflect a very particular design aesthetic, one that was minimalist and "cute." This aesthetic helped guide us in creating features and a layout needed in the platform.

We then worked on mapping the user-experience journey. We started with the onboarding process (which we skipped due to the time constraint), moving to the home screen, and defining the key elements needed; Plant Management (My Plants), Settings, and a Social Feed. After defining these features, we then moved to add constituent components and actions that users would take once engaging with these elements.

From a development perspective, I worked with Yash to translate the user experience journey into a development structure. We started with a pseudocode walkthrough and then instantiated the required functions, elements, and classes.

Once this was done, we each split up to our operational areas of expertise. Faith began to design the UI, I began to create the graphic and brand assets, and Yash began to code the backend.

Designing the identity for LeafBook was centered around the ethos discussed above, in that the design had to be both "cute" and minimalist. With these two criteria, I set to work on creating a logomark that would encapsulate this vision. When I visualized what a "cute" plant would look like, I immediately thought of a bonsai tree. This led me to create a little tree, with the branches forming an "L" to allude to the first letter in LeafBook. I then created the pot for the plant, opting for a wave look that helps to relax and soften the mark, achieving the "cute" standard I desired. I then started looking for a compatible logotype that would help bring this idea to life. I settled on Jonathan Barnbrock's Sora, a typeface that was based on a Japanese type-aesthetic. The logomark and logotype come together to produce a robust yet simple identity. As I completed these graphics for the brand kit, I would incorporate them into the UX kit for Faith to utilize. After this, I set to create a demo video and design ancillary graphics needed for our submission to DevPost.

Working with this team on this project was a fantastic experience. Our team and project would go on to win the Figma Challenge Prize at DubHacks 2021.

PROJECT TEAM

Faith Ong

Rishab Balakrishnan

Yash Mishra

ROLE

Designer

Videographer

TOOLS

Adobe Illustrator • Adobe PhotoShop • Adobe Premiere Rush • Figma

PURPOSE

Hackathon

TIMELINE

October 2021 (24 Hour Challenge)

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