Asterisk started out in 2014 as HackDFW, with the goal of creating one of the largest collegiate hackathons in Texas. Over the years, a few of us were passionate enough about it to turn it into a business, becoming a close-knit, dedicated team of event professionals who design and produce hackathons, conferences, and digital events for clients large and small. As we grew, we found ourselves trying to optimize certain processes and reaching the limits of off-the-shelf tools, which drove us to design and build our own in-house dedicated production tools, including an event website builder tool, a custom registration portal, improvements to an open-source judging tool, and a design system to support both.
One of the services we offered clients alongside production was event “live sites,” interactive informational hubs accessible during an event that serves as a digital event guidebook. For hackathons, these sites would almost always contain details on the schedule, judging and submission rules, sponsor information, real-time announcements, and FAQs. Creating these sites from scratch for each event was a time-consuming effort, so given that the information being shared was often repeatable, we saw an opportunity to create a site builder tool with preset templates that obviated the need for writing code, saving us a lot of time and energy.
The Live Site Builder offers easy-to-use preset templates for much of the information mentioned above as well as a WYSIWYG editor for custom pages. Need to show information on sponsors? A preformatted sponsor page is possible with just a few forms. The COVID-19 pandemic forced events online, so we responded by adding live streaming functionality to the platform, transforming it into a full-fledged online event hosting product.
The Live Site Builder helped us massively speed up our production pipeline, particularly for hackathons, allowing us to deploy all the technology needed for an event in as little as 3-4 weeks while maintaining a high-quality event experience. Further updates enabled live site customizability including fonts, colors, and custom code.
As we set a vision for a suite of event hosting tools based on the success of the Live Site Builder, we saw the need for a design system to tie all of our technology to the Asterisk brand. Hyphen contained components for buttons, forms and data entry, banners, tabs, global styles, and more. Having a design system allowed us to speed up our design-to-development handoff process, where developers could quickly build out UIs by using equivalent code snippets for each component they saw in the designs.
