HolaNeighor; a creative experiement
Hola chaos, adios productivity – that is the true tagline of DC’s social experiment, Startup Weekend. But it was a great time none-the-less and much was learned; just not what I thought I would have learned. DC Startup Weekend was more of a crash course in living the life of a start-up than it was creating a successful start-up itself. Sort of like NASCAR camp for web geeks – they get to take a couple laps around the course but are by no means ready to race with the big boys.
The site “launched” but 80% of the discussion and work done during that weekend never saw the light of day. I had to sort of separate myself from the chaos to get anything done. I went off in my little corner and took anyone that would follow — I ultimately came up with the name, HolaNeighbor, designed the brand identity as well as the homepage concept and several interior page concepts; all between a Friday night and early Saturday morning. I’ve said it myself, the name isn’t perfectly amazing — but I was sticking with it until I or someone else came up with something better.
HolaNeighbor Homepage Concept:
This concept was created on Friday night between the hours of 11:30pm and 1:30am.
HolaNeighbor Interior Page Design Concept:
This concept was completed around 2pm Saturday afternoon.
HolaNeighbor Brand Logo Design Concept:
This concept was completed around 9pm on Friday night — I knew if I were pitch a name, I would have to bring a visual to the table to help sell the concept.
I am preparing a longer more detail post on the chaos of the weekend, but I wanted to quickly share the early design concepts since the site launch didn’t really incorporate them. This isn’t meant to feed my own ego — I just hate thinking that I spent an entire weekend with strangers and didn’t ultimately have anything tangible to show for it. I did however make some new friends!
- November 5th, 2007
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Martin - The weekend looked fun. I thought about attending (I’m a techie project manager and general “ideas man”) but it already looked severely overbooked by the time I realised it was happening.
It sounds like you have a good ‘Olympian’ attitude - taking part is more important that winning :)
are you guys getting back together or if it didnt IPO by Monday the game was over?
Great question! I know there s a team getting together to keep the beast alive — I am going to try and contribute, but as the ongoing task will likely be much more production oriented, I don’t know if I will be able to keep myself excited (especially since it is free labor and I’ve got like 100 other side projects I am passionate about).