Give It a Face - Design × Dev Hackathon

Everything has an identity. Most things just haven't been designed yet.Give It a Face is a 3-hour design hackathon happening live at Future of NYC Design — an official NYCxDESIGN 2026 and NYC AI Week event. You'll work in cross-functional teams of designers and developers to build something with a genuine creative identity: considered typography, deliberate color, real visual character, and functional code behind it.This isn't a productivity hackathon. We're not looking for dashboards or CRUD apps dressed up with a UI kit. We're looking for work that has a point of view — aface— something you couldn't have made if the designer and the developer hadn't been in the same room together.The challenge is open-ended by design. A neighborhood. A dataset. A community. A brand that doesn't exist yet. A tool for someone who's never had one. A feeling. Whatever you choose to give a face to — own it. Make it unmistakably yours.Get startedPick a subject that doesn't yet have a designed identity and build one — a visual identity system, an interactive experience, a generative tool, a living brand. The only rules: it must be visually considered, technically functional, and built by a team that includes both design and development thinking.Some prompts to spark ideas — not requirements, just starting points:What does your block in NYC look, sound, or feel like as a visual system?What if an underrepresented community had a brand as strong as any Fortune 500?What does a dataset look like when it's actually been designed?What if a tool for making creative work had the visual craft of the work itself?What would you build if the interface could have a personality?