Positions in: Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa, and elsewhere in Africa
Use your visual storytelling skills to champion digital democracy across Africa.
Code for Africa (CfA) has an immediate vacancy for a full-time Junior Multimedia Designer to join our Engagement team and turbocharge audience engagement around our digital democracy and civic technology projects.
CfA’s Engagement team is responsible for managing CfA’s public audience, by managing our platforms, communications and brand. The team actively works to grow CfA’s reputation and amplify our thought leadership and accomplishments through compelling multimedia storytelling.
The successful candidate will help CfA create graphic designs and animations (such as animated GIFs and short engaging videos) to spark conversations on social media.
Your application will be judged based on your creative talent and technical expertise in graphic design and/or simple illustration and animation skills. Candidates can hail from the media, advertising, or any other creative industry. All you need is a talent for creating strong visual content.
The successful candidate will work as part of a multinational and multilingual team, using digital collaboration tools to create content for a global audience and international media partners. If successful, you will work on projects spotlighting human trafficking, misinformation, public health threats, award winning investigations and much more.
Required: minimum requirements include
- You have a portfolio/showreel of demonstrating your graphic design and/or animation/social video/GIF/ illustration making skills.
- You’ve worked on content that went viral, became a meme, or made a meaningful impact on a community.
- You have mastery of the Adobe Creative Cloud Suite, in particular XD, Illustrator, Photoshop, and AfterEffects.
- You understand the relative strengths of the different social media platforms, and the different narrative/visual techniques necessary for engaging the different audiences on these platforms.
- You are able to work with writers, developers and product managers to plan out visual content across multiple platforms.
Preferred: candidates who are able to demonstrate the following will have an advantage
- You have a knack for telling immersive stories across different platforms, customised to the specific audience while remaining true to the core narrative.
- You’ve built an engaged community or gathered an active following around the content you’ve created.
- You’re familiar with design prototyping tools like Figma and Sketch.
- You’ve worked on brands or projects that are globally recognised and disruptive.
- You’re experienced with digital collaboration tools, including Slack, Google Drive, Trello and Airtable.
Language and Location Requirements:
- Location: Candidates from Kenya, Nigeria or South Africa are preferred, but strong candidates from across Africa will be gladly considered.
- Primary languages: English
- Preferred but not required: Amharic, Arabic, Hausa, French or Kiswahili.
About the Role:
The successful candidate will join us on CfA’s Engagement team. The team is responsible for telling CfA’s story, and keeping it accessible and engaging. We amplify the work of our experts and external project partners across Africa, and communicate our shared vision of a more open, connected, and technologically empowered continent.
As the Junior Multimedia Designer you’ll work alongside the senior designer to create engaging visuals, copywriters to create the narrative, copyeditors to make the content sing, and social media strategies to ensure that we’re getting the best out of the platforms themselves.
You will occasionally also collaborate with the Data Designer, Illustrator and UX Designer in CfA’s StoryLab team.
Your primary role will be to find visual treatments for the branded content and technologies that our teams build. You will need to inject a sense of passion, energy and immediacy into all these campaigns, through clever designs and illustrations. The resulting content will be published across all of our platforms, to engage and inspire members of our ecosystem.
In doing so you will stay at the cutting edge of your field, curating benchmarks and keeping ahead of trends in digital storytelling to ensure that CfA stands apart.
Responsibilities: Your daily responsibilities will include
- Produce designs to accompany CfA and partner content, as well as social media promotions
and campaigns (examples from The Economist, Facebook/PesaCheck and Thomson Reuters Foundation). - Produce gifs for social media promotions and campaigns (examples from The Economist, UN Women and NPR).
- Contribute designs and animations for social media videos (like these examples from the World Health Organisation and Viral Facts Africa).
- Maintain a reference list/database of competitors and benchmarks of quality.
- Develop a distinctive and world-class visual style to put CfA ahead of global partners.
- Support the development of coherent brand guidelines for CfA, our social media and platforms.
- Enforce a consistent, high visual standard across CfA comms platforms.
What We Offer:
- A competitive salary, subject to experience, with opportunities for performance-based growth, both in terms of career path and public stature.
- A dynamic workplace, with a transnational team, and generous vacation benefits.
- Ongoing opportunities to learn new cutting-edge skills and techniques/technologies to future-proof yourself in a rapidly evolving industry.
- A chance to shine on a global stage, publishing for international audiences and interacting with colleagues around the world.
How to apply:
Please fill in this form by 30 August 2022. Applications shall be reviewed on a rolling basis.
About Us:
Code for Africa (CfA) is the continent’s largest network of indigenous African civic technology and investigative data journalism laboratories, with over 70 staff in 19 countries, who build digital democracy solutions that are intended to give citizens unfettered access to actionable information that empowers them to make informed decisions and that strengthen civic engagement for improved public governance and accountability.
This includes building infrastructure such as the continent’s largest open data portal, open.AFRICA, and largest open source civic software portal, commons.AFRICA, as well as the largest repository of investigative document-based evidence, source.AFRICA, as well as incubating initiatives as diverse as the africanDRONE network that gives citizens their own ‘eyes in the sky’, the PesaCheck fact-checking initiative in 12 African countries, and the sensors.AFRICA remote-sensing citizen science initiative to combat air/water pollution.
CfA also incubates the African Network of Centres for Investigative Reporting (ANCIR), as an association of the continent’s best investigative newsrooms, ranging from large traditional mainstream media to smaller specialist units. ANCIR member newsrooms investigate crooked politicians, organised crime and big business. The iLAB is ANCIR’s in-house digital forensic unit, with teams in east, south and west Africa. ANCIR uses its resources to strengthen newsrooms’ own internal capacity, by providing access to the world’s best whistleblower encryption and investigative semantic analysis technologies, as well as skills development, and seed grants for cross-border collaboration.
At CfA, we don’t just accept differences – we celebrate it, we support it, and we thrive on it for the benefit of our employees, our products and our community. CfA is proud to be an equal opportunity workplace and is an affirmative action employer. If you have a disability or special need that requires accommodation, please let us know.
To all recruitment agencies: CfA does not accept agency resumes. Please do not forward resumes to our employment application line, CfA employees or any other CfA contact. CfA is not responsible for any fees related to unsolicited resumes.