Senior Visual Designer, MPP (4-month contract, $80/hour, 40 hours/week)

This role is for September 2023-January 2024

ABOUT KHAN ACADEMY

Khan Academy is a nonprofit organization on a mission to provide a free, world-class education to anyone, anywhere. We already reach millions of students every month and are growing rapidly, and right now we’re hard at work helping learners address any unfinished learning that the COVID-19 pandemic may have caused. We also know that not all communities have been impacted equally by this pandemic, which makes our work focusing on providing equitable solutions to historically under-resourced communities even more important.

WE ARE DRIVEN BY OUR COMMUNITY 

Our students, teachers, and parents come from all walks of life and so do we. We are fun, diverse, quirky people that come from a variety of backgrounds. Our team includes people from academia and from high tech companies and tiny startups. We hire great people from diverse backgrounds and experiences, not just because it’s the right thing to do, but because it makes our company stronger. Valuing diversity, equity and inclusion is necessary for us to actualize our mission and truly impact the communities we serve. We believe that the best way to provide impactful education is to create a diverse team of people from different backgrounds, races, religions, genders, sexual orientations, ages, and experiences.  We’re a hardworking team that’s passionate about helping learners and teachers around the globe! We strive to be world class in investing in our people and commit to developing you as a professional. 

THE WORK

Imagine being a teacher in Sarasota, Florida, three years after the pandemic started, with a classroom full of 6th graders who haven’t had a normal year of school or learning since 2019. It’s the reality of so many educators and students who use Khan Academy – and our team is uniquely positioned to help them when they need it most.

We have no end of fascinating challenges that can only be solved with a deep empathy for our users and audiences, world class visual design skills (and thinking), deep love of storytelling and understanding of its power,   and a strong drive to make a positive impact. Some questions we’re working on answering right now are:

• How do we best design joyful and impactful experiences for learners and teachers?
• How do we support teachers who are dealing with the impact that the pandemic had on learning?
• How do we help students with learning gaps catch up to their grade level?
• How do we center schools serving historically under-resourced communities in our product design and development?
• How do we reach more school districts so our learning experience gets used in more classrooms?
• How do we best design joyful and impactful experiences for learners and teachers?
• …and more

The best part? Our work really matters: catch Sal talking to CNBC about low math and reading test scores.

As a Senior Designer, you’re an experienced generalist. You will work primarily with the Marketing, Philanthropy and Product (“MPP”) design team, supporting our brand & visual language - and their proliferation throughout our organization, and the world. We’ve been especially focused on integrating visual, brand and emotional design into our products - so expect lots of cross-disciplinary collaboration.

As a designer, you have an exceptional eye for visual design, solid user experience chops, and are a natural storyteller. You have a holistic approach to design, and are able to execute both high quality visual design, as well as occasional interaction design.

You will also play an important role on an inclusive, collaborative, small but mighty Design team, helping us fulfill the mission of the organization: to provide a free, world-class education to anyone, anywhere. We genuinely care about people and value compassion in our everyday interactions. You’ll be able to be yourself, feel valued, supported, learn and grow, no matter how experienced you are.

WHAT YOU'LL DO

• Work with teams across the organization to craft high quality, meaningful, engaging experiences across brand, visual language, marketing, and philanthropy campaigns.
• Collaborate with other designers, brand thinkers, and storytellers to help us evolve our visual language and user experience, and their relationship to the company’s mission.
• Offer strategic guidance on how to incorporate engaging visual language into effective user experiences.
• Provide thoughtful feedback and art direction to internal and external illustrators & designers.
• Educate and advocate for emotional and conceptual cohesiveness across brand, marketing, product, and content.
• Take pride in all levels of  your work; from developing rich social media and campaign collateral to more complex UI and UX collaborations.
• Identify and evangelize for injecting moments of joy into our communications, culture and product. 
• Create style guides and document best practices.
• Evaluate our current platform and communications surface area and identify opportunities to improve user experiences, meet strategic goals, and boost learning mindset. 
• Facilitate workshops and conversations that help other teams incorporate visual and emotional design.
• Autonomously decide how to approach a design problem and organize your own work.
• Move between creating rough sketches to high-quality drawings to communicate your solutions. Use user research and data to inform your style and reasoning.
• Present to and incorporate feedback from stakeholders from Product Design, Engineering, Product, and Brand.
• Proactively look for opportunities to propose creative solutions and ideas that align product releases, marketing campaigns, philanthropic fundraising goals, strategic partnerships, etc.

WHAT YOU BRING

• You have a strong visual eye/sensibility.
• You have an ability to balance individual design work with strategic thinking and developing broader visual systems.
• You have a rich and diverse portfolio showing evidence of different types of projects, visual maturity, and attention to nuance. 
• You can work with a low-ego, highly collaborative, cross-functional team.
• You can shepherd complex projects from start to finish, bringing stakeholders and partners along for the journey. 
• You have a deep curiosity about how and why people learn - and how they respond to visual and emotional cues.
• You have a willingness to switch between complex (Product) design problems and production work.
• You are highly proficient with current visual tools (Figma, Adobe Suite, etc).
• You have experience working on cross functional teams.
• You are comfortable working within a self-directed culture and are proactive about navigating ambiguity.
• You have experience with accessibility and designing for a very wide array of audiences, including school-age children, teenagers, young adults, and adults.
• You have experience creating  illustrations for digital products.
• You’re interested in and care for how design can lead to inclusion or exclusion of different audiences.
• You have excellent presentation, communication, and documentation skills.
• You have experience working with copywriting, and have an understanding of verbal identity/language best practices.
• You have illustration & art direction chops.
• Bonus points if you have animation skills.

Qualities we value in ourselves, and those who join our team:

• Introspective, mature, and emotionally intelligent.
• Invested in your own growth and the growth of our Design team.
• Proactively seek out the people/information you need to move work forward and unblock yourself.
• High comfort level working within a strong vision for Philanthropy and Districts marketing from our Chief External Relations Officer Vicki Zubovic.
• Able to balance the immediate tactical needs of helping deliver and ship features with scouting ahead for what’s next.
• Willing to roll your sleeves up and pitch in when a project goes off-script.
• Passionate about education and designing engaging learning experiences, deeply curious about how and why people learn.
• Huge bonus if you’ve worked at a startup before.

NOTE: Submitting a portfolio with your application is required. We're looking for a portfolio that demonstrates exceptional design solutions and visual design chops that are aligned to business objectives within tight timeframes and constraints.

MORE ABOUT US

• Sal’s TED talk from 2011
• Sal’s TED talk from 2015
• Our team:  http://www.khanacademy.org/about/the-team

OUR COMPANY VALUES

Live & breathe learners

We deeply understand and empathize with our users. We leverage user insights, research, and experience to build content, products, services, and experiences that our users trust and love. Our success is defined by the success of our learners and educators.

Take a stand

As a company, we have conviction in our aspirational point of view of how education will evolve. The work we do is in service to moving towards that point of view. However, we also listen, learn and flex in the face of new data, and commit to evolving this point of view as the industry and our users evolve.

Embrace diverse perspectives

We are a diverse community. We seek out and embrace a diversity of voices, perspectives and life experiences leading to stronger, more inclusive teams and better outcomes. As individuals, we are committed to bringing up tough topics and leaning into different points of view with curiosity. We actively listen, learn and collaborate to gain a shared understanding. When a decision is made, we commit to moving forward as a united team.

Work responsibly and sustainably

We understand that achieving our audacious mission is a marathon, so we set realistic timelines and we focus on delivery that also links to the bigger picture. As a non-profit, we are supported by the generosity of donors as well as strategic partners, and understand our responsibility to our finite resources. We spend every dollar as though it were our own. We are responsible for the impact we have on the world and to each other. We ensure our team and company stay healthy and financially sustainable.

Bring out the joy

We are committed to making learning a joyful process. This informs what we build for our users and the culture we co-create with our teammates, partners and donors.

Cultivate learning mindset

We believe in the power of growth for learners and for ourselves. We constantly learn and teach to improve our offerings, ourselves, and our organization. We learn from our mistakes and aren’t afraid to fail. We don't let past failures or successes stop us from taking future bold action and achieving our goals.

Deliver wow

We insist on high standards and deliver delightful, effective end-to-end experiences that our users can rely on. We choose to focus on fewer things — each of which aligns to our ambitious vision — so we can deliver high-quality experiences that accelerate positive measurable learning with our strategic partners.

We are committed to equal employment opportunity regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, gender, gender identity or expression, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability, or Veteran status. We value diversity, equity, and inclusion, and we encourage candidates from historically underrepresented groups to apply.