About the Ballers
The Oakland Ballers are a professional baseball team in Oakland, CA, and are part of the independent Pioneer Baseball League.
The Ballers played their inaugural season in the Summer of 2024, including making it to the playoffs, and are gearing up for their 2025 season.
The Oakland Ballers baseball team is dedicated to bringing baseball back to Oakland. Our mission is to build a championship team alongside fans and create a joyful, community-focused experience for the people of Oakland and the entire East Bay.
We believe in the power of sports to bring people together and are committed to making Oakland a championship city once again.
About the Position
The Ballers have a brand identity, logo, color palette, word marks, and a library of design executions from the 2024 season.
We're looking for a part-time, remote graphic designer that can help elevate our brand, create designs for print, social media, paid social media, and our website, to help promote our season, homestands, theme games, promotions, fan experience, and more.
We are looking for someone who can help us make templates that are easy to use in Adobe Illustrator and in Canva. We're looking for someone who can create impactful creative and also execute on detailed technical specifications for delivery assets.
Hours for this part-time position would be variable and would ramp up and down, with some weeks off, some weeks needing full time work.
We expect it to average 12 hours a week.
This position reports to our Chief Marketing Officer (CMO), and would work frequently with our Digital Marketing Specialist and Social Media Manager.
Duties
- Design digital promotional graphics for our season, homestands, theme games, unthemed games, sponsors, and more.
- Propose and execute evolutions / expansions of our brand identity with color palette additions, themes, motifs, typography guidance, and templates.
- Create a digital template kit for game promos, game-day announcements, player trade announcements, new-player announcements, mid-game stats updates at 3rd and 6th inning, win / loss announcements
- Design print assets including at least 2 posters, 2 fliers, 2 postcards, and 2 season schedules
- Design single-ink t-shirt assets, including at least 3 t-shirt designs for themed games (last year we made t-shirts for Star Wars Night, Grateful Dead Night, etc)
- Design multiple layouts of our season schedule to fit different digital and print viewing experiences (mobile phone, desktop, postcard, poster, perhaps pocket foldable)
- Create templates that are easy to use in Illustrator and Canva
- Train our staff on template execution.
- Create paid media and social media graphics that are content-safe, title-safe, logo-safe, and survive the specific croppings and overlays encountered in various views the given platforms will display them in.
- Search through our 2024 Season photo library (date folder based) to hunt for the best photos when a design calls for photography
- Design a suite of banner ads promoting ticket sales
- Keep meticulously organized project asset folders and files and frequently back them up to our cloud file storage system.
- Adhere to our naming conventions for files, deliverables, etc.
- Store assets in a new digital asset management system and tag them thoroughly, once we have the system set up.
- Work closely with our Social Media Manager, Digital Marketing Specialist, CMO and Head of Sponsorships to make sure scopes, specifications, timelines, and deliveries are well understood and adhered to.
- Embrace a transparent working style with early sharing of work, frequent feedback, and iteration-oriented tactics
- Adhere to accessibility and legibility standards in terms of contrast, colors, typography, etc.
- Other duties as assigned by the CMO.
Qualifications
- 3+ years professional experience as a designer with a sports team, digital marketing agency, or graphic design agency
- Ability to create high quality, creative designs, especially promotional, social media, poster, and postcard designs
- Expertise in Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop
- Excellent typography skills
- Ability to lay out and export a project in multiple aspect ratios (9x16, 1x1, 4x5, 16x9, 2x1, 2.68x1)
- Experience optimizing images for web and email delivery.
- Extreme attention to detailed specifications for content-safe, title-safe, logo-safe, and cropping survival, for each given aspect ratio.
- Patience and diligence in hunting through our photo library (based on per-game folders) for the best photography when a design calls for photography
- Ability to train junior and non-designers on how to tweak and use templates you create, in Illustrator and Canva
- Ability to organize files and folders for projects in a clean, reusable, consistent way.
Nice to Have
- Experience designing for META paid media
- Experience designing for sports marketing
RATE : This is a part-time role that pays $50 / hour. Hours are variable and would ramp up and down, with some weeks off, some weeks needing full time work.
We expect it to average 12 hours a week. If you are an independent contractor or design agency, we are also open to a contractual agreement.
We are an equal opportunity employer and all qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, age, disability, gender identity, marital or veteran status, or any other protected class.