The Dovetail research group is looking for a graphic designer to help us illustrate our explainers and papers. The illustrations are mostly diagrammatic, and we have a pre-existing style that we want to maintain. If you have questions about any part of this application, please send us an email at contact@dovetailresearch.org.
Compensation: hourly, based on reasonable market-rate for your area.
Availability: we’re looking for someone who will be regularly available for work, throughout the next year. That said, it won’t be a full-time position; it would likely average out to 5-10 hours per week. Work would come in batches whenever we publish something.
Skillset: Ideally the illustrations would be produced using Manim, the python-based animation library developed by the popular 3b1b youtube channel. Manim is most essential for the complex animations, but is also very well suited to producing static mathy diagrams as well. Having everything produced with Manim will help keep our style and asset management consistent. It also makes it easier for others on the research team to modify illustrations (because many more of us know python than e.g. Adobe Illustrator).
That said, Manim is a pretty niche tool, so we’re very open to applications from people who have no prior experience with Manim but are happy to try learning it, or from those who are happy to deliver SVGs as an interoperable format, and stick to the diagrams that don’t require being programatically generated.
If you’re ready to apply, please send us a resume or equivalent link to contact@dovetailresearch.org.
In addition, as a work-trial task, send a Manim file that generates a version of this image (it doesn’t need to be an exact match).
If you would like to apply to do non-Manim graphic design, then please send an SVG version of the Dovetail logo. The SVG should be written in such a way that it is reasonably modifiable by someone who doesn’t necessarily know how to use any particular graphic design software, to do things like changing the color.
Most of the illustraions we make use of are pretty simple in terms of graphic design.
Often our illustrations use equations or expressions, and for that it’s easiest for us to write them out in LaTeX. Manim can render LaTeX natively, so you don’t need to know it.
Sometimes we make a series of diagrams with very similar elements, like these Bayes nets.
Sometimes the diagrams get fairly complicated.
Here’s the most advanced illustration we’ve used so far. This one really made use of the full expressivity of python as a program language (though we don’t expect applicants to consider themselves programmers). At this level, they’re pretty time-intensive and so they’re not usually worth it, but it would be a big asset if someone could help us produce them more effectively!
Though most of the illustrations are diagrammatic, we’ll occasionally use fully representational images where you can employ more creativity, like this one…
