Associate Illustrator, Product Design

🚨 Urgent Hiring. Applications are reviewed on a rolling basis. The selection process may take up to 4 weeks, but early applicants are strongly encouraged.

Do You Turn Great Creative Direction Into Finished, On-Style Product Art?

At Hadley Designs, we believe that learning should be enjoyable, engaging, and screen-free. Millions of parents and teachers trust our beautifully designed, developmentally aligned educational tools to help children grow and thrive. As a fast-growing, family-founded brand, we are on a mission to make learning meaningful for families around the world, and we are looking for an early-career illustrator who wants to spend their days making the art that goes into our products.

We are seeking a Illustration & Product Design Assistant to work hand-in-hand with our Chief Creative Officer, taking her creative direction and carrying it through to finished, production-ready product art. This is a maker's seat, not a template-and-layout role. If you love to draw, you have a genuine eye for cute, playful, kid-friendly design, and you want to grow your craft inside a brand that ships beautiful products every month, this is a rare opportunity to build your portfolio while doing work that reaches millions of families.

About Hadley Designs

Hadley Designs is redefining early education with creativity and purpose. Every product we create is hand-drawn and teacher-designed, crafted with care to build confidence and connection. Our screen-free tools help families and teachers make learning fun and meaningful, nurturing curiosity and creativity in children.

Our Mission: We design screen-free products that parents can trust to help their children learn, grow, and reach their full potential. We create beautifully designed, developmentally sound tools that replace noise and distraction with connection, curiosity, and real learning.

Our Vision: We aim to build the most trusted children's brand in the world, present in millions of homes, reshaping how families learn, connect, and grow. Our products will be so widely used and passed down that generations of children will grow up learning from them and choose them again for their own families.

Role Overview

As our Illustration & Product Design Assistant your one job is to turn the Chief Creative Officer's vision into finished, on-style product art, so Hadley Designs launches new products faster and our creative capacity is multiplied, not capped by a single set of hands. The CCO sets the tone, the style, and the strategy; you carry the hands-on execution, creating new artwork, completing sets in an established style, and building each concept out to production-ready. This is a deliberately early-career seat for someone with real illustration talent who wants to keep growing that craft. You will not be expected to arrive as a seasoned art director. You will be expected to draw well, learn our style quickly, take direction cleanly, and finish the last mile of the creative so the CCO can stay focused on setting direction rather than executing it.

Key Responsibilities

Original Illustration & Artwork

• Create new artwork and complete sets in Hadley Designs' established style across our product lines.
• Draw and illustrate original elements like characters, motifs, patterns, and scenes that fit our cute, kid-friendly aesthetic.

Product Design Execution

• Turn the CCO's concepts and creative direction into finished, production-ready product designs.
• Carry a design from initial handoff through final build-out without kicking work back up the chain.

Creative Production Support

• Own the execution offload (variations, building out a design across a full set, and file prep) that frees the CCO's hands.
• Prepare print and production files to spec, and build mockups and product previews for listings.

Style Consistency

• Keep every piece on-style and on-brand across the full product set.
• Maintain the living style-reference so the look stays consistent as the catalog grows.

As-needed: occasional ad-ops support (A+ content, storefront updates, CMYK ad images) and revisions on existing product lines. This is secondary support, not the core of the role.

How Success Is Measured

First-pass approval rate: the share of deliverables the CCO accepts with no major rework. This is how we measure "on-style" objectively.

New original art created: the volume of original artwork generated to feed the product pipeline.

Sets / SKUs completed: finished design sets shipped per month. The speed lever.

On-time delivery: the share of assigned pieces delivered by the agreed deadline.

• Framework-to-finish independence: the share of projects carried from CCO handoff to production-ready without kicking work back up.