OVERVIEW
Vibeathon — an experimental AI hackathon in Providence, RI that brought designers, developers, and curious builders together to create projects in a single evening using AI tools.
The idea grew out of our game night discussions about AI tools and our own experiments, which led us to meet up for vibe-coding sessions. Kenji figured if we were this into it, others would be too.
Kenji, Ted, and Matt
CHALLENGE
Over dinner we discussed the logistics and challenges. We recognized the biggest unknown was if we'd have a place to host the session. Everything else seemed feasible. We left with a single action item: secure a venue. We each would reach out to our contacts to see if anyone would host us.
Securing a Flexible Venue for Collaboration, Building, and Demos
As potential hosting options emerged through our outreach, my connection with RIHub brought the ideal venue into the conversation and ultimately made the decision straightforward. Hosting Vibeathon inside the Cambridge Innovation Center (CIC) gave us a flexible environment built for exactly the audience we hoped to attract: founders, designers, and builders.
Multiple rooms allowed us to shift between presentation, collaboration, and demos, creating a shared hub while giving participants space to spread out and work.
Designing the Visual Identity
The logo came together quickly, collaboratively, and without overthinking it.
Kenji kicked things off by pulling reference images and establishing an aesthetic direction: 80s tech nostalgia meets neon-glowing futurism. High energy, a little retro, unmistakably digital. He opened a Figma file with a few wordmark options and drafts with a visual mark, and Ted and I chimed in with feedback, landing on a direction.
From there, I took the chosen font into Illustrator and drafted a few concepts. I refined the wordmark and developed the visual mark, a stylized V built from vertically divided, decreasing rectangles, echoing the striped retro sunset from our inspiration.
Being designers, we moved fast and had the logo ready to use in a day.
Vibe Coding the Vibeathon Website
CHALLENGE
With no prior event to pull photos from, no design system in place, and a volunteer timeline, the goal was a polished result without a prolonged process.
SOLUTION
The approach: vibe-code in Cursor, derive the palette from the logo, and pull graphics from SVG Backgrounds. Fast by design.
PROCESS
Building the Vibeathon site by vibe-coding was not irony, it was intentional. Vibe-coding now has a negative connotation, which is fair when applied to complex systems where unreviewed code creates risk. In this case, the output is visual, the stakes are low, and the speed is the feature.
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The color palette was pulled directly from the logo, hot pink through purple into aqua. I knew a dark theme background would pair with the neon glow. Pure black felt flat, so I chose a deep purple: enough color to fit the retro aesthetic, dark enough to keep text readable and UI elements luminous.
I designed and built the HTML site in Cursor AI, with review and feedback from Kenji and Ted. The visual foundation came from SVG Backgrounds, my own stock-graphics library, where I pulled a few full-screen backgrounds, a scribble divider, icons, and a section shape divider, assets that gave the site character without starting from scratch.
On the CSS side, I tend to prompt in the language I already think in: specific rules, specific properties. Asking for a particular box-shadow is faster than writing it manually, and since Cursor links directly to where it made changes, tweaking the output is straightforward.
Visit Website
Outcome
Vibeathon started as an experiment, but the results made clear how intentional design —even outside of software— can shape energy, participation, and community.
Thirty strangers showed up and built together
Vibeathon had no existing audience and no proven track record, just an open invite and a simple premise. 30 people came anyway, and the energy held from kickoff through final demos. Animations, websites, experimental tools, early prototypes: people were actively making things all night, and many asked about coming back.
Design shapes behavior beyond the screen
The event's success came down to a few deliberate choices: a short kickoff to create momentum, multiple workspaces so people could self-select how they worked, and public demos to close the night with shared learning. No contests, no themes, no prescribed outcomes. Just the conditions that made building feel natural.
Designing alongside others reminded me how rewarding shared creation is
This was my first deeply collaborative project in a while, and it reaffirmed something I'd underweighted: building with people is just as satisfying as designing the systems that enable them. Watching the room respond to design decisions in real time, rather than inferring it later from analytics, was its own kind of reward.