CMU Data Science Club
Design something the next board can reuse
Two years as Design Director: brand identity, event graphics, mascots, and the website for the first Poker AI competition at CMU, which the next board built on the following year.
CMU's Data Science Club runs workshops, speaker events, and competitions across the year. As Design Director I owned everything visual: the logo, the mascots, GBM and workshop graphics, speaker cards, and the website for the club's first Poker AI competition, co-hosted with the Poker Club and backed by Jane Street, HRT, Jump Trading, SIG, IMC, and Trexquant.
The event ran over 24 hours. Teams of up to four built bots to play a poker variant that wasn't revealed until the start. No poker knowledge required, workshops provided, $8,000+ prize pool.
Consistency is what makes a student org look credible to sponsors. The DSC logo is a tree-of-data mark, branches ending in nodes, designed to work in navy on white and white on dark. It sits in the same corner of every graphic. Type hierarchy and proportions stay fixed. Inside that frame, each event type gets its own mood: workshops use playful line-drawn people; speaker cards use soft gradient portraits; competitions go bold on black with a mascot.
The Poker AI 2024 site was built in HTML, CSS, and JS, specifically so the next board could update it without a designer. They did. The 2025 splash page was built directly on mine.
six events, six different vibes, same system underneath.
Each competition got its own robot character. The AI Agents Weekend mascot is a blue sprout-robot: rounded, friendly, clearly a bot. The Poker AI mascot has card suits for eyes. They're designed to make a technical event feel approachable, the same way the Poker AI site answered "no poker knowledge needed" in the first scroll.
