The posting
ABOUT PLAYLAB
Playlab is a nonprofit building public infrastructure for educational AI: enabling a global community to create AI tools that reflect their needs and values. We equip communities with AI tools and hands-on professional development that empowers educators and students to build custom AI apps for their unique context. Over 60,000 educators have published apps on Playlab, and the impact is growing every day.
If you're passionate about building creative, equitable futures for students and teachers, we hope you'll join us.
THE ROLE
At Playlab, we believe that AI is a new design material, one that should be shaped by many.
The next decade of education will be defined by who gets to design how intelligent systems are developed for and deployed in education. Most AI products cast teachers and students as end users, receiving outputs from a system someone else designed. We're building an alternative: educators as the designers of AI systems, and of how they and their students interact with them. Your role is to help carry this idea into the world in deep partnership with our community.
At Playlab, visual communication designers own the brand and the surfaces where people encounter and build with it. You'll shape how educators learn about AI and grow the confidence to tinker with it, making sophisticated ideas legible without flattening them.
You'll examine how we might make Playlab's ideas compelling to educators, funders, and the field, while conveying the rigor it takes to bring them to life. You'll get close to the people who use Playlab and the contexts they work in, helping collect and share their stories with the world.
You’ll do this at a nonprofit that culturally sits between a startup and R&D lab:
- As a non-profit, we’re deeply committed to interrogating AI and are the biggest critics of our own work. Our governance keeps our incentives aligned with improving teaching and learning, not growth for its own sake.
- As a startup, we believe in designing under the actual conditions in which educators and learners will interact with AI, and in shipping value to them every day.
- As an R&D lab, we work on unsolved, longer-horizon problems, and treat our own product as an ongoing experiment.
WHAT YOU’LL DO:
As Senior Visual Communication Designer, you'll own the design of how Playlab shows up in the world, from concept through produced work. Your contributions might take the form of brand expression, storytelling, data and information, motion, interface, and print.
- Craft: Your work has a clear point of view, is pertinent, and production-grade. You take it all the way to done, prepping and shipping final assets across formats as reusable systems. You have good instincts for when to ship fast to keep us learning, and when to slow down for things that need more care.
- Narrative sense: You form well-reasoned points of view on how Playlab should tell its story, because you stay close to the people we're trying to reach and the ideas we're trying to land. You turn complex systems and ideas into narratives and visuals that are intuitive, engaging, and true to their depth. You can hold unresolved questions and keep moving through the ambiguity.
- Initiative: Given a fuzzy goal or problem, you can define the space, gather the right context, and drive it through iteration to shipped work. You think ahead to dependencies, edge cases, and second-order questions. You proactively bring leadership along to validate decisions as you build.
- Technical fluency: You're very comfortable with print, web, and motion to bring an idea to life. You build with and on AI. You use it as a creative material and stay current with where it's heading, and you build or curate the tooling and workflows that let you work faster.
- Taste: You bring a distinct visual voice and a clear, articulable point of view on what makes something good across visual, interaction, and communication design, including the restraint to know when a rough edge serves the work better.
YOU ARE A FIT IF:
1. You have at least 5 years of experience with a strong foundation in graphic design, a home base in visual communication (brand, editorial, campaign, web), and a track record in one or more other design disciplines.
2. You can lead design on the projects you own while collaborating closely across the team.
3. You have broad knowledge of creative tools and workflows, including the ones that leverage AI, and you build or curate tooling to speed up your own work.
4. You care about learning and enjoy spending time in learning environments and with the people who create them (teachers, students, school leaders, etc.).
5. You find joy in getting technical and you’re a strong producer: fast and exacting at taking files to production, and comfortable owning the last mile of getting work out the door.
BONUS POINTS FOR...
- Experience in education or building in edtech
- Experience with designing creative tech
- A love for creative side quests
NOTE
We encourage you to apply even if you don't meet every qualification listed in this job post. Research shows that people from underrepresented groups are more likely to experience imposter syndrome and to doubt the strength of their candidacy, so we urge you not to count yourself out. We're building toward equitable futures where AI reflects the full range of people who learn and teach with it. We hold ourselves to that same standard in who we bring onto the team. If this work speaks to you, we'd like to hear from you.
