Hacker Con - Blog Posts

When I learned that Neighborcon's own Travis Goodspeed encouraged attendees to counterfeit the con's Tennessee-shaped badges, I swore I'd make the best Tennessee-shaped badge ever and proudly display it at Neighborcon NYC in December 2009.

When I arrived I found out Travis meant the badge should be shaped like Tennessee the state, not Tennessee the playwright.  How embarrassing.

Permanent marker on PVC.

The Next HOPE conference badge, for which I did the graphics.

These badges didn't just grant admission to the conference, they served as fully functional and hackable tracking beacons for its Attendee Meta-Data project.  (There's a video explaining the basics here, and more hardcore hardware info from the extremely neighborly Travis Goodspeed here.)  After the electronics were laid out and finalized, I was given the badge files so I could scrawl like a madman all over graphically enhance them.

I used what space and resources I had to bring the badge in line with the conference's retrofuturistic design theme, while highlighting and playing with some of the text labels and gadgetry within.  I even snuck in a silly little detail only a few people ever found and called me out on; the grid above the arrow logo makes use of a method I came up with in elementary school for hiding messages in notebook sheets, and contains the conference's initials.

This is the first thing I ever made completely in Inkscape.