About the Role: 

Are you interested in applying your Visual UI design superpowers towards creating beautiful and functional visual UI skins on a digital learning platform for students of various ages? Do you geek out on typefaces, color palettes, design patterns, layouts, iconography, and grid systems? Enjoy collecting beautiful design and art references like Pokémon cards? Do you have professional experience integrating your visual design vision for user interfaces within software, apps, and/or video games? Can you move between design styles, from clean, elegant, contemporary minimalist to fun and whimsical, and even flex some illustration chops?

If so, you’ve come to the right place!

You will be building, maintaining, and evolving our visual design pattern system for lessons and engagement, translating existing UX clickables into visually pleasing and functional user interfaces for lessons and the engagement platform, communicating design thinking with stakeholders and development teams, and partnering with UX, Artists, Curriculum, and Software Engineers in the execution of UI designs in a software development environment. This role requires an understanding of how to create beautiful, interactive visuals for a wide range of student ages--from kindergarten to middle-school and beyond--within the technical constraints of web-based software and touchscreen devices.

The Visual/UI Designer will also help champion best practices and set a high bar for visual design in the overall student experience. Our work environment is fast-paced and highly collaborative: excellent cross-discipline communication and presentation skills, attention to detail, and the ability to adapt are a must! This role will report to our Senior Art Director in Bellevue, WA. Please note that this is NOT a UX or UIUX role, but a Visual UI role for software/app/game development – you will be expected to have outstanding graphic and visual design chops as a baseline for consideration.

What You'll Be Doing:

• Use Figma and Creative Cloud apps to translate existing UX wireframes into visually stunning, intuitive, and elegant visual UI designs for our student product, such as lessons and our various learning environments.
• Present visual UI designs to stakeholders and iterate on the designs based on feedback.
• Take point on building, maintaining, and evolving visual systems, style guides, and UI tool kits for lessons and student engagement.
• Collaborate with Designers and Artists on how best to turn static designs into engaging interactions.
• Convert the visual design of lesson UI into production-ready vector-based art assets using Adobe Animate, either independently or with an Artist during the development phase.
• Using versioning software to commit design assets into appropriate product branches and repositories.
• Reviewing your integrated designs within a development environment—product builds, sandboxes.
• Support the Art Director in ensuring that lesson and student-facing visuals meet visual design expectations via Art Reviews of student-facing projects during the development phase.
• Participate in scrum team meetings, sprint planning, product demos, sprint exits, and any other agile software development ceremonies, including quarterly planning.
• When applicable, partner with Artists and other Designers in design of any needed motion graphics and UI animations that support engagement and the learning experience.
• Address issues and feedback related to the visual design elements in the student product.
• Participate in and contribute to user feedback sessions and usability studies.
• Support the Art Director and team with occasional graphic design support for student engagement and internal and external communications (Product Releases, Marketing, etc.).
• Champion best-practices for visual UI design and graphic design and elevate the quality of our overall product visuals.

In your first few weeks, you will:

• Read our on-boarding resources to get you started.
• Attend various team stand-ups, grooming sessions, demos, and sprint exits to get familiar with how our development scrum teams operate.
• Schedule 1:1s with key team members to introduce yourself and understand how Design and Art groups partner with development teams to create lesson content.
• Set up your development environment.
• Play the student product to familiarize yourself with our lessons and engagements and learn how DreamBox adapts to each student.
• Get up to speed on the existing design system and patterns for our lesson UI in Figma.
• Familiarize yourself with the content development pipeline, workflows, and design documentation.
• Embed yourself in a project team to get started on your first project.

In your first 3 months, you will: 

• Create visual UI designs in Figma for our lesson and/or engagement UI based on existing UX wireframes while following existing visual styles and design patterns.
• Present visual UI designs to stakeholders and team members, communicate design thinking, and modify designs as needed based on feedback.
• Provide callouts and specs for Artists and Engineering to inform art asset creation and development.
• Partner with other Artists, UX Designers, and Developers in the creation and implementation of UI assets using Adobe Animate into the product build.
• Review your designs in the production environment (sandboxes, demo environments).
• Support the Art Director in reviews of implemented visuals during development and prior to release.
• Help to maintain and add to the existing visual design system and patterns for the student product.
• Address UI or visual bugs and feedback.

In your first 6 months, you will: 

• Have successfully taken ownership of the visual UI design for at least one lesson project, from early design ideation to release-ready.
• Take ownership in building, maintaining, and evolving visual systems & style guides.
• Own the Art reviews for your project(s) to make sure the implemented visuals appear as expected and meet the quality bar.
• Be able to balance multiple design projects in various stages of development.
• Provide design input and support for other projects.
• When needed, partner with Designers and Artists in any project needs for student engagement and occasional Marketing support.
• Participate in and contribute to User Testing sessions to learn more about how our users engage with lessons and engagement and gather user feedback on visual design proposals.
• Help champion quality, industry-standard design aesthetics and best practices as it applies to lessons and engagement.
• Participate in a company-sponsored hackathon.
• Reflect on mid-term performance with your manager and identify areas of growth.

About You:

• Exceptional understanding and execution of core visual design principles--layout, visual hierarchy, typography, color, pattern, grid—and iconography in apps, software, and/or games.
• Holistic visual design systems and patterns mindset. Big-picture thinking to pixel-perfection.
• Knowledge and experience in designing user interfaces within the visual, functional, and technical constraints of interactive experiences and/or games.
• Versatility in visual styles: can execute on either clean, elegant, contemporary design aesthetic or fun, whimsical UI based on target audience.
• Strong empathy for all users and understanding of special considerations when designing UI visuals for kids and young adults--attention span, reading level, accessibility, language, etc.
• Strong skills in quickly mocking up and iterating on ideas and clearly presenting complex information simply.
• Proactive, collaborative, self-starter with excellent communication and presentation skills.
• Extensive experience with Figma and Adobe Creative Cloud apps. We use Figma in our daily workflow.
• Solid iconography and digital illustration skills and experience.
• Some experience with or willingness to learn Adobe Animate to create production-ready UI art assets.
• Familiar with front-end web development (HTML, JavaScript and CSS) – at a minimum, you will understand web and mobile constraints.
• Experience with version control (Git, Subversion).
• Experience with bug tracking software (JIRA, etc.).
• Proficient in productivity apps and software in a professional working environment (MS Office, Confluence, Slack, etc.).
• 3-5 years of software development, games, or similar interactive product experiences using Agile/SCRUM methodologies.
• Bonus: motion graphics or animation experience.
• Bonus: Experience in a leadership or mentorship role.
• Special requirements: Please include a link to your portfolio when applying. Be prepared to show samples of process to show the design thinking behind polished pieces and include samples of design patterns and style guides.

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