Brand Designer at Code for Africa (CfA)

 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 to drive a more open, connected and technologically empowered continent. 

As a brand designer, you will play a crucial role in developing innovative visual strategies for CfA as a whole alongside individual identities for our flagship products and projects. Once established, you will create and maintain design playbooks for each identity, ensuring all visual assets created for each brand comply with the established identities. You will continuously stay up to date with international trends in graphic design, ensuring CfA and its associated brands remain fresh, sharp and visually unique. 

You will work with the rest of the design and engagement team to create brand collateral as needed and to ensure that brand guidelines and identities are being adhered to, wherever they appear. 

Responsibilities: Your daily responsibilities will include

• Developing a distinctive and world-class visual style to position CfA as a leader among global partners
• Designing and establishing brand identities for CfA’s projects and products as needed 
• Producing brand assets and designs to complement CfA and partner content, as well as social media promotions and campaigns.
• Crafting, adapting and maintaining brand guidelines for CfA and CfA’s products and projects.
• You’ve worked with globally recognised brands or projects, or are able to create world class branding  (such as Google, The Economist,  and  Vox.com, and Rest of the world)
• Enforcing these brand guidelines to ensure consistent, high visual standards across CfA’s platforms.
• Contributing designs for digital properties such as websites, social media videos and marketing merchandise.
• Contributing to designs for printed collateral such as stickers, t-shirts and banners
• Maintaining a reference list/database of competitors and benchmarks of quality.

Required: minimum requirements include:

• Proven experience working in a similar role or field, preferably for at least 3 years
• Ability to articulate a brand or project’s story through design assets, effectively capturing its vision and tone.
• A strong grasp of design principles, such as emphasis, alignment and balance, contrast, repetition, proportion, movement, and white space. 
• Mastery of design software, such as the Adobe Creative Suite (e.g., Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign), and other relevant design tools.
• A creative flair and a keen eye for keeping pace with emerging design trends globally and within Africa
• Strong communication skills to effectively collaborate with multinational team members and partners, interpreting and conveying brand concepts through design.

Preferred: candidates who are able to demonstrate the following will have an advantage:

• Ability to transform brand identities into visually appealing marketing assets, including web and social media designs,, email campaigns, roll up banners, stickers, t-shirts, and leaflets.
• Ability to work in both traditional and digital mediums, combing them to create powerful visual identities that stand out from the crowd
• Ability to create a variety of formats, from stills to gif to longer animations
• Understanding of what works best for different platforms such as Facebook vs Twitter vs TikTok vs WhatsApp
• Capable of working independently and managing multiple projects simultaneously.
• Familiarity with digital collaboration tools like Slack, Google Drive, Trello and Airtable.

Language and Location Requirements: 

• Location: Anywhere in Africa
• Primary languages: English
• Preferred but not required: Amharic, Arabic, Hausa, French, Kiswahili or any other major language spoken in Africa