Illustrator

About Us:

Ranked in 2024 by the Financial Times, Moniepoint is Africa’s fastest growing fintech, trusted by over 10 million business and individual accounts, processing billions of Naira’s in transactions monthly. Our mission is to enable financial happiness for every African, everywhere.

About this role:

We are looking for a talented Illustrator to create original pieces of artwork for Moniepoint products. You will work as part of our User Experience, digital & creative team, interpreting complex briefs and developing inspiring artwork that will attract our target audience. You will be responsible for formulating concepts and rendering draft illustrations from written words, models, sketched ideas, and from your imagination. Ultimately, we are hiring a creative individual who can turn concepts into artistic marketable images.

Our customers are shop owners, traders and entrepreneurs, and many are new to digital products. They run their businesses on POS terminals and small, low-memory Android phones, often over unreliable connections, and they trust us with their money. Think of a merchant taking their first card payment, or one who has just seen a payment fail and needs to know their money is safe. In those moments, an illustration is often the first thing they understand, before they read a word.

You'll create the illustrations that meet merchants in those moments. Each one has to make its point at a glance and work for every merchant, whatever their ability, literacy or language. It also has to feel unmistakably ours and load quickly on a weak connection.
You'll be the third illustrator on our design system team, learning alongside two senior illustrators. You'll take briefs from product designers, content designers and marketing, working within our style and asset library and designing from scratch when the library doesn't cover the brief. Your work will appear in our products, customer education and campaigns across POS, mobile and web. Your closest partners are the design system designers, who help bring your work into the system.

What you'll do

• Explore two or three directions for new briefs, then finish the strongest in our established style across product, education and marketing.
• Create illustrations that make their point without a caption, and check them on real devices and with merchants to confirm they're understood.
• Design for accessibility from the first sketch, so meaning never relies on colour alone and detail holds up on small, low-quality screens. Agree alt text with content design.
• Represent our customers, their shops and their markets accurately and respectfully, so every merchant can see themselves in our product.
• Reuse characters, scenes and components from the asset library first, and structure files so others can adapt them without rebuilding.
• Design new characters, scenes and components within the library's rules, and work with the design system designers to add them.
• Deliver production-ready assets (SVG, PNG, WebP) that stay sharp and light on POS terminals, low-memory Android phones and the web, plus animation-ready files for the motion designer.

What you need to succeed

• 4+ years of professional illustration experience, in-house, agency or freelance, including work shipped in a digital product.
• A portfolio that shows strong composition, colour and form, work within an existing brand style, people represented with care, and how you get from a brief to a finished piece.
• Experience in Figma and Adobe Illustrator, including working from shared asset libraries and preparing production-ready files.
• Clear spoken and written communication, so you can explain your design decisions and work
  through feedback with your partners.

Nice to have

• Experience illustrating for financial services, icon design, and motion design would be a plus.
• Experience illustrating for fintech or other consumer-facing digital products.
• A working knowledge of motion principles, or experience preparing assets for animation.

What to expect in the hiring process

1. Recruiter conversation. Your background, what you want next, and practical details.
2. Case study review. Walk a senior illustrator through one or two projects in depth, from the brief and your early directions to the finished assets.
3. Illustration task. We'll send you a brief and a Figma file with what you need to work in our style. The task takes about three hours. You'll then present your directions and finished work to the hiring manager and a senior illustrator. The work you create for the task stays yours,
and we won't use it in our products or campaigns.