Introduction

Over the next year, we will be looking to partner with new freelance artist/animators to help expand our product base of educational games and playful apps - now being used by millions of children.

Our plan is to build a list of potential creative partners we could work with in the future. If this sounds like you, we'd love to hear from you.

About Teach Your Monster

We make high quality educational apps for kids. Our flagship product is Teach Your Monster to Read: a multiple BAFTA award-nominated educational app, one of the world’s leading literacy products played by over 1 million children every month.

https://vimeo.com/157426386

We are now in the process of developing new apps and games for kids aged 4 and upwards, both in reading and in other areas of learning and development.

Teach Your Monster Games are a non-profit company, funded by the founder of Usborne Publishing.

Job Description

Teach Your Monster are looking for multi-skilled freelance illustrator & animators with experience in expressive creature and character design, background design as well as excellent compositional and colour skills. Artists/animators will be used to working in vector art and ideally have experience in delivering assets for games.

Apps used in production will most likely be Illustrator, Photoshop, Unity, Animate with the possibility of using Spine, Blender or Affinity. Details will be confirmed when establishing the art pipeline.

Our teams are small (2-3 members) and work remotely but we are looking for a UK based illustrator/animators as there will be a number of on site meetings over the course of production (possibly London).

Roles will be a short term contracts of 2-3 months part-time for 3-4 days per week.

Teach Your Monster Art Style

You don't have to have made stuff for kids before, but we are looking for people that make things that are delightful, funny, with great characters and story.

We’re not looking to emulate our current art style, but are looking for artists with a sense of style and design sense that will complement the existing products. Each Teach Your Monster product will have a different artist defining the look and feel, but that each product will still fit the umbrella brand through some stylistic choices and careful curation of artists and art direction.

Below we have identified a few qualities that we think help define a Teach Your Monster product:

• It should look like a top tier game or animated show aimed at kids, not dry or cheap which can be an issue in some educational products.
• There should be a quality to the design and world building that is fun and inspires delight in the players. They will want to spend time in the ‘world’, with the characters, and return again and again.
• The style can be flexible, but to maintain some consistency it should be flat and colourful, lacking outlines and with a similar level of detail to the original game.
• Having said the above don't be constrained creatively or otherwise by what's been done before. We want to see your ideas and approach.

Below are a few images we have assembled as part of our mood board to give an idea of styles that could work under the Teach Your Monster umbrella.

Above are a few of our favourite designs from Teach Your Monster to Read. The Hungry Beast at top right is a particular favourite for it’s expressiveness, boldness and colour.

Four images from our moodboard, looking at styles might complement the current product. They have been selected for their qualities — colour, shapes, character design, simplicity, etc.

What we will be doing

Over the next year, we will be creating some new products and prototypes, with the most promising projects moving through to full development.

These will be focussing on new areas of learning and development for children, which could be anything from maths to mental wellbeing.

We’re looking to build contacts with the right kind of people so we have creative partners ready to collaborate with when concepts move to the development stage.

How we work with people

We work hard at Teach Monster Games to make a great culture for the people working with us:

• High autonomy - we find the best people and let them work in their own ways.
  
• Not deadline driven and against crunch.
• Team members mainly work remotely with occasional face to face meetings (mainly London).
• Flexible on when we work together hours-wise and very parent-friendly

Interested?

Send a short summary of your experience, a link to your portfolio and point us to the projects that are most relevant to us. If projects come up that look relevant to your experience, we'll be in touch!

More information about the organisation

• Find out more about our funders and priorities at The Usborne Foundation website.
• Find out more about Teach Your Monster to Read.