Senior Visual Designer

Job Description

Job Description: Senior Visual Designer, New York, NY

We're hiring a senior designer for the New York studio — the person whose visual work makes a client feel something before they read a word.

WHY DESIGNERS TAKE THIS JOB

You'd be early. Not startup-early, where the money runs out. Early at a studio with a Fortune 100 client list already in the building and an engineering organisation with the capability to build ideas most studios can only propose. What this studio becomes, and what it looks like, hasn't been decided yet. You'd be one of a handful of people who gets to decide it. In five years, when the work is known, the fingerprints on the original are yours. You'd learn here. Your work gets reviewed by the studio's creative leadership — properly, in a real critique, by people whose own work has been recognised at the highest level. Real critique takes time and senior attention, and both are set aside for it here. There's no handoff to a build partner, no point where someone else's internal team takes it from here. The thing you conceived and designed goes live, at scale, to a very large number of people. The category is wide open. Banking, healthcare, retail, transportation — systems that enormous numbers of people use every day, and that have not had the design attention they deserve. We have a real mandate, with budget behind it, to make work in that space that competes at D&AD, Cannes, A and the Apple Design Awards. Closing that gap is the job.

WHAT YOU'D DO

Own how the work looks. You'll own type, color, layout, motion, iconography and illustration across the entire visual surface of the products and the pitches. You're not skinning wireframes. You're in the room when the structure gets decided. Make the pitch work. New business gets won because someone saw a prototype and wanted it to exist. Often that will be your prototype, and you'll present it yourself, in plain language, to people who decide things.

Move fast with the tools, then slow down where it matters. Use generative tools for exploration, mood, pre-viz, variation and production, and get to more directions in less time. Then the part where craft takes over. Build systems that don't sand off the interesting parts. Design systems at enterprise scale tend to flatten everything into sameness. Hold the line against that. Design for people who don't see, read, or move the way you do. Accessibility is part of the craft, not a remediation pass at the end. Make the people around you better. Crits, portfolio reviews, mentoring whoever comes in after you. You'll be senior to someone sooner than you think.

WHO YOU PROBABLY ARE

5+ years in digital product design . Based in New York. If you're short on years and the work is there anyway, apply. A portfolio with a visual point of view somebody could recognize without your name on it. Apps, platforms, product experiences where the way it looks is part of the reason it works. We hire for visual judgment and craft first on this role. Command of the fundamentals. Typography, color, grid, hierarchy, iconography, motion — not as vocabulary, as decisions you can defend. You can say why something is good, specifically: "this pairing works because," followed by an actual sentence. You design with WCAG and inclusive design principles in mind, because beautiful and accessible is the standard, not a tradeoff. Your references come from outside the design feed. Books, buildings, record sleeves, films, street signage, other people's countries.

You think in flows, states and systems, not just screens. UX and interaction fluency has to be there, and you work with UX leads as a peer rather than as a downstream resource. It isn't the thing that makes someone right for this role, but the work doesn't hold without it. You can build it, not just picture it. Figma, Framer, ProtoPie, After Effects, code — whatever gets the idea to move at a fidelity people can react to. AI fluency in your process. You use generative tools daily for visual exploration, prototyping, and production, and you have a clear point of view on where they help and where you've decided they're not good enough yet. You've presented your own work to someone senior and survived it.

NICE TO HAVE, NOT REQUIRED

Recognition from A FWA, the Webbys, Brand New, TDC, ADC or Communication Arts. Identity and brand system work, and knowing how to get brand into a product without losing either one. Motion fluency — Lottie, After Effects, Rive, Cavalry. Design for AI-native products: conversational interfaces, generative UI, agentic experiences, made to feel beautiful and trustworthy instead of awkward. Writing or speaking about craft in public. Actually required: taste, nerve, and the willingness to be told the work isn't there yet.

WHAT THE WORK IS ACTUALLY LIKE

Some of this work goes through review — legal, accessibility, regulatory. Designing something beautiful inside those constraints is harder than designing without them, and we treat that as the design problem rather than as the reason the work has to be ordinary.

EOE:

Our client is an Equal Opportunity Employer, committed to a workplace free from discrimination and harassment. Employment decisions are based on business needs, job requirements, and individual qualifications without regard to race, color, religion, gender, age, disability, sexual orientation, gender identity, marital status, military service, genetic information, or any other status protected by law.