The Pedagogy Lab, Inc.

Job Description

The Pedagogy Lab Visual Design Brief The Pedagogy Lab is looking for a designer to help us grow our existing visual identity into a flexible set of assets for our website and social media. We have a logo, color palette, and several mood boards that offer a strong starting point. We would love help building from those materials and shaping them into a visual system that feels cohesive, distinctive, and easy to carry across future projects. The Pedagogy Lab is a nonprofit organization that creates open educational resources and supports innovative teaching and learning. Our work sits at the intersection of open education, critical pedagogy, speculative practice, games, digital media, and publicly engaged scholarship. Our projects often engage Black feminist thought, Afrofuturism, queer and trans studies, disability justice, digital justice, speculative fiction, and critical approaches to technology. The visual identity should be able to hold all of that intellectual and political complexity while remaining inviting, playful, and usable. What we’re hoping to create: 1–2 homepage or hero graphics a small set of modular illustrations or visual elements that can be reused across the website and social media recurring motifs, textures, icons, or decorative elements a few editable social media templates typography and color-use guidance a lightweight style guide to help future materials feel connected Visual direction We imagine the work feeling: funky, playful, and experimental speculative and slightly surreal intellectually serious without feeling overly academic or institutional culturally grounded and human bold and layered, while still leaving room to breathe Our references draw from Afrofuturism, retro-futurism, collage, editorial illustration, speculative games, circuitry, cosmic imagery, organic forms, and surreal environments. We are especially interested in the tension between: organic and technological archival and futuristic maximalist and spacious handmade and digital playful and rigorous Our logo is detailed, ornate, and retro-futurist, and we would like the broader visual system to feel connected to that world without needing to match its density in every application. The mood boards also include artwork from the video game GRIS. We are drawn to its atmosphere, negative space, delicate linework, sense of scale, and expressive use of color. It is more of an emotional and compositional reference than a style we hope to reproduce directly. A few directions that feel less aligned: We would like to steer away from generic academic or nonprofit branding, corporate “innovation” aesthetics, stock classroom imagery, flat-vector office scenes, overly literal education symbols, sterile minimalism, and generic sci-fi imagery. We are also interested in an approach to Afrofuturist influence that feels thoughtful, expansive, and culturally grounded rather than relying on familiar visual shorthand. The finished system should feel recognizably connected to The Pedagogy Lab, even when the logo is not present, while leaving enough flexibility for individual projects to develop their own visual character. We would be excited to work with a designer or illustrator who: has a strong sense of visual storytelling and enjoys building flexible systems rather than one-off graphics is comfortable working with bold color, texture, collage, illustration, or experimental composition understands how to balance expressive visuals with accessibility and practical web use can build from an existing logo, palette, and mood boards while bringing their own creative perspective is thoughtful about the cultural and political traditions informing the work, especially Afrofuturism and Black speculative art enjoys collaborative, iterative projects and is comfortable helping refine the visual direction as the system develops can create assets that staff without advanced design skills can continue using Experience with nonprofit, educational, cultural, or arts organizations would be helpful, though we are most interested in a strong portfolio and an approach that feels aligned with the project.