Sarah Schanze

Art & Design

Professional Experience

Senior Visual Designer
Stride, January 2018-July 2023

  • Principal lead for grades K-5 One Voice project; finalized templates for both web and mobile layouts, cropped and edited images, maintained design standard documentation, collaborated with subject matter experts to adjust content to fit into established templates
  • Lead designer on Language Arts K-5 and Spanish Language K-5 course; created assets and finalized templates, created new illustrations and edited reused art from older courses, worked with managers and designers to create standards that led to completing all assets ahead of schedule
  • Created design elements for both K-5 and 6-12 Chinese language course and movie supplement project, pulling inspiration from historical art and film visuals used to determine background patterns and color schemes
  • Used in-house authoring tools, Adobe software, and CSS to create media-rich and responsive web assets that complied with state accessibility standards
  • Collaborated with other designers and managers to create visual design standards that remained consistent across grades and subjects
  • Trained new designers and international vendors in current visual standards and asset development
  • Created art to excite and educate students, from colorful character illustrations to technical graphs or charts, using Photoshop, Illustrator, and Procreate

Visual Designer
K12 Inc., June 2008–June 2017

  • Led IMA/Grade 6 Math, High School Fine Arts, and ELA grades 4 & 5, creating hundreds of assets
  • Primary designer for Pre-K online course “Embark12” which won a Parents’ Choice award in 2014; built assets in Flash and created whimsical illustrations to increase engagement
  • Created black and white and color illustrations for print media, including Classics for Young Readers and Kindergarten Treasury
  • Illustrated “Stowaway”, a thirty-page graphic novel for print and online publication. Designed the characters and props and setting
  • Built hundreds of Flash-based assets for dozens of courses such as educational slideshows and review activities incorporating media, illustration, and animation; was part of initiative to migrate Flash-based assets to HTML5 and CSS
  • Collaborated with instructional designers, print designers, and project managers to complete courses and assets efficiently
  • Participated in company workshops with goals of improving student retention, creating mobile-friendly enrichment items, and thinking up new ways to use proprietary tools

Technical Skills

  • Photoshop
  • Illustrator
  • InDesign
  • Figma
  • Blender
  • Procreate
  • Microsoft Suite
  • HTML
  • CSS
  • Atlassian

Education

The Art Institute of Washington, Arlington, VA

  • Bachelors of Fine Arts degree in Media Arts and Animation
  • Graduated Magna Cum Laude, December 2007
  • Awards: Merit Scholarship, Dean’s List, Washingtonian Award