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 Associate Designer, Product Development

Highlights for Children is a family media brand that has been nurturing children with high-quality, innovative products for 80 years. We reach more than two million children every month throughout the world with products that foster curiosity, creativity, caring, and confidence. Our wide variety of “Fun with a Purpose” magazines, books, digital products, and services are dedicated to helping children become their best selves both intellectually and emotionally.

Over the past few years, we've enjoyed exciting, explosive growth in new business directions that include subscription boxes, partnerships, new kinds of retail products, and early learning magazines and books. We are looking for a junior designer who is both creative and flexible as we explore and satisfy the needs of emerging markets and lines of business. You will join a team of passionate, creative, and collaborative professionals who are excited to bring our content and brand to life through new and innovative product development initiatives. 

We have an immediate opening for a creative, motivated Associate Designer.

The Associate Designer will support the work of the Creative Director and other senior designers across all initiatives and product lines in the Highlights’ Consumer Product Development portfolio. This includes magazines, books, book plus projects, activity kits, subscription boxes, and other types of print publications for children. 

The Associate Designer will have the opportunity to learn about working within a brand, supporting product design, and executing on a variety of design tasks and initiatives. This includes supporting the magazine designers in templated designs, ongoing design work on series or existing projects, commissioning illustration, managing and finalizing files for print, managing preflight of files for production, and supporting the work of our Innovation and Partnerships teams. Overall, this person will help ensure that our products get out the door on time and with creative excellence. 

Essential Duties and Responsibilities:

• Support and execute interior magazine design for ongoing pages and departments 
• Support work of new business initiatives with design directions and dummies for presentations
• Design cover wraps and evergreen issues for special editions 
• Support the work of magazine designers by setting up files in our desktop workflow
• Support work of book designers on ongoing series
• Create collateral materials such as product dummies, cover directions, interior sample spreads
• Ensure files are prepped for print to our final standards

Supervisory Duties:  None

Education and Experience:

• 2–3 years demonstrated design experience in children’s publishing and/or media
• Demonstrated ability to listen and communicate clearly, both visually and in written form
• Demonstrated strong production skills and knowledge of the printing process
• Previous experience working within brand guidelines is a plus
• Proven skills in the Adobe CS Suite and Microsoft Office, and willingness to learn our existing corporate software systems (Censhare, Workfront, title management, etc.) 
• BFA or professional work-equivalent required 

Qualifications:

• Proficient in InDesign, Photoshop, and Illustrator. Strong communication skills, well organized, must be collaborative, self-motivated, positive, and able to manage a large workload in a fast-paced environment, with the flexibility to balance multiple priorities as projects and objectives evolve, concepting new product design and other materials on tight schedules.

Physical Requirements:

• Prolonged periods sitting at a desk and working on a computer. 

Reasonable Accommodation Notice: Federal law requires employers to provide reasonable accommodation to qualified individuals with disabilities. Please tell us if you require a reasonable accommodation to apply for a job or to perform your job. Examples of reasonable accommodation include making a change to the application process or work procedures, providing documents in an alternate format, using a sign language interpreter, or using specialized equipment.

Highlights for Children is an Equal Opportunity Employer. We are committed to providing equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants without regard to race, color, religion, sex, pregnancy, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, age, disability, genetic information, veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by applicable federal, state, or local law.