King of The Hill

Context

King of The Hill started where Hardcore Harry’s started: with the founders.

Hardcore Harry’s exists for everyday legends, the people who push themselves further than they thought they could. King of The Hill is the live, physical extension of that ethos. Each year, in Pyalong, about ninety minutes north of Melbourne, athletes meet at the base of a hill and run a 4.2 kilometre loop with around 300 metres of elevation. On the hour. Every hour. Until one person is left standing.

The format is unforgiving and simple. Three elimination triggers: miss a lap, blow the hour, tap out. There is one winner each edition: the last person standing. How long that takes depends on when the second-last runner drops. The longest lasting has been 90 hours.

The brief was to build a sub-brand for that.

The vision came from the founders. King of The Hill had to do two things at once. It had to physically display the power of body and mind, as a stage where the community could witness the pursuit of greatness. And it had to be a hub. A camping ground, a finish line, a community hall where the Hardcore Harry’s audience could gather in person to suffer, support, and connect.

The business goal was sub-brand strategy: extend Hardcore Harry’s into the offline world without diluting it.

Process

The strategic anchor for King of The Hill needed to do something tricky. Visually it had to feel more elite than Hardcore Harry’s, a destination event with the gravitas of something you would fly across the country for. But it could not exclude the audience. The everyday legend who is just trying to make it to five laps belongs at King of The Hill as much as the 90-hour superathlete on the leaderboard.

Two references defined the brand world.

The first was Red Bull’s event design. Total commitment to a brand world, the same look and feel from the trailer to the gate signage to the lower third on the livestream. King of The Hill had to be that consistent across every surface.

The second was the Australian backyard ultra tradition. Suffering as camaraderie. Pretenders separated from contenders by a hill that does not care who you are. A culture that is not glossy, but is earned.

The brand needed to live somewhere between those two worlds. Elite visual confidence on the surface, real-world grit underneath. Polished enough to feel like a destination, raw enough to feel like Pyalong at three in the morning.

I worked the system from there. Identity. Type. Voice. Broadcast. Every surface had to read as one brand world, on and offline.

Solution

Visual identity

Built from zero. A wordmark and crest system that scales from race bib to twenty-foot finish line banner. A type system that pairs a confident display face with a workhorse body face for race information and athlete data. A high-contrast colour system that holds up at noon in full sun and at three in the morning on a livestream camera.

Promotional design

Paid social, organic social, email, web, registration flow, and merchandise across two annual editions, scaling up year over year. Returning legends. Ticket sale pushes. Course teasers. The campaign runs cold in autumn and lights up by registration close.

Hero campaign. The 2026 edition leads with returning legends, the athletes who have come back to try again. Each post sits in the King of The Hill brand world but lets the athlete carry the moment.

Social tiles. 1:1 announcements and event hype for the 2026 edition.

Ticket sale push. The “final release” warning campaign for the 2025 edition. Sold out fast.

In-app banners. Surfaced inside the Harry’s app during the registration window.

Merch. Race day jersey, legionnaire cap, and the winners’ medals. Click any item to see it full size.

Live broadcast design

Every hour, the event is live. The broadcast was directed by our Lead Videographer. I designed the graphics package that drives every frame: the always-on scoreboard, picture-in-picture athlete cards, sponsor placements, pre-show and post-show graphics, transitions, and the final standings reveal. We worked closely from camera plan to overlay rev. The brand world had to read in every cut, day or night, hour after hour.

Cinematic documentary

The 2025 edition got the full cinematic treatment. After the last runner stood at the top of the hill in the dark, our Lead Videographer cut a documentary that captured the weekend: 90 hours of suffering, the support crews under tents, the moment the second-last person tapped out and a winner was crowned. I worked alongside him on the graphics package across the cut: title cards, lower thirds, athlete callouts, and the transitions that tie back to the broadcast and the on-course brand world.

Event day

Race bibs, on-course signage, start line banner, support crew identification, and the camping-ground brand activations that turn Pyalong into the King of The Hill village for 72-plus hours each year. Click any item to see it full size.

Outcome

Two editions in market. Three of them, including 2026, by the time it next runs.

The 2024 inaugural event proved the format. 2025 scaled up, with a deeper field, a larger broadcast, and a more developed brand system around it. The 2026 edition is now in production as the biggest yet. The prize pool sits at around $50K AUD, split into a Grand Prize, Endurance and Speed sub-categories, and bonus prizes for athletes, spectators, and support crews.

As seen on…

+ National & regional press

Most importantly, the event has done what it was designed to do. King of The Hill has become a physical hub for the Hardcore Harry’s community, a place where the everyday legend and the 90-hour finisher line up at the same start line. The brand made that legible from a phone screen, from a livestream, and from inside a tent at midnight at the bottom of the hill.

What’s next?

2026 will be the third and largest edition. The scaling work is in motion: more cameras on broadcast, deeper graphics package, longer post-event content, expanded on-course brand presence, and a year-round narrative so King of The Hill becomes more than one weekend a year. The brand system that started as event identity is becoming the Hardcore Harry’s offline product line.