▷ 15h Left: Senior Visual Designer

- Role Summary- As a Senior UX Designer, You lead advanced UX and strategic product design initiatives. Focusing on refining design systems, improving usability, and ensuring products are usable and accessible, contributing to user-centric innovation. You are starting to take on informal leadership roles, often guiding Junior UX Designers and Interns in project-based tasks. At this level you might have formal management responsibilities with direct reports.- As a Senior Visual Designer, you are at the heart of the creative process. You are instrumental in developing functional design systems that intelligently leverage the visual elements of design (type, color, layout, images), all important in crafting a memorable user experience. Your work involves refining design concepts, and ensuring that visual design aligns with user expectations, project objectives, and the client's brand. You guide juniors to understand the subtleties of visual hierarchy, and the importance of design consistency. At this level, you might have direct reports and assume management responsibilities.

Although your background and focus is on the craft of UX design, you have some experience and interest with leveraging skills from other UX design disciplines such as visual design, design research, strategy, and content.

- Project Responsibilities

Collaborate with multidisciplinary teams that include design researchers, UX designers, visual designers, developers, and product or project managers.

Develop visual design concepts for digital user experiences that intelligently leverage the elements of design (type, color, layout, composition, imagery) that combined work to create a memorable and high-quality user experience.

Refine design concepts, ensuring visual design aligns with user expectations, project objectives, and client's brand.

Create, maintain and organize functional component systems for user interfaces.

Present work to clients through the lens of a user-centered narrative, guiding clients to understand how design decisions impact the intended user experience.

- Leadership & mentorship responsibilities

Guide more junior designers on the team to understand the subtleties of visual hierarchy and the importance of design consistency.

Guide more junior members of the team around project priorities regarding visual design, and delegate tasks appropriately.

Present during internal/studio knowledge-share events to build your communication, leadership and mentorship abilities.

Some Senior Designers will take on formal management responsibilities with direct reports (including conducting goal-setting, career growth coaching, and performance reviews with more junior designers)

- Craft-specific technical skills

Proficient, capable and constantly improving:

User-cented Design: Skilled in user-centered design, with the knowledge of how to gather and prioritize user feedback and requirements to create interfaces that cater to the user's needs and expectations.

Heuristic Principles: Skilled in applying heuristic principles to assess and improve interface designs and can identify common usability problems and suggest solutions.

Interaction Design: Demonstrable grasp of interaction design and can effectively use established user interface patterns to create intuitive and familiar user experiences.

Design Systems: Knowledgeable about design standards and current trends. And can apply this knowledge to create designs that meet industry expectations and user preferences. Have experience in developing and applying design systems, consistent design guidelines and applying them to various projects.

Usability Knowledge: Have a demonstrable understanding of usability principles where you have designed with usability in mind, ensuring that interfaces are user-friendly and efficient.

Responsive Design: Can demonstrate proficiency in designing for multiple platforms, with a deeper understanding of grid systems and design behavior and can showcase designs that work well and look great on a variety of devices and screen sizes.

Accessibility Standards: Have a good understanding of accessibility standards while often referring to documentation to inform decisions while designing interfaces that adhere to accessibility guidelines, making digital content accessible to all users.

Prototyping & Wire-Framing: Demonstrated proficient in creating detailed wireframes and interactive prototypes and using these artifacts to validate and refine design concepts effectively.

Information Architecture: Poses advanced proficiency in strategically organizing and structuring information, employing user-centric design principles to optimize user experience and navigation within digital systems.

Visual Design Principles: Effective in working with the principles and elements of visual design including layout, typography, color, and composition to create visually appealing experiences.

Visual design systems: Able to create cohesive, unified libraries of reusable components that ensure consistency and efficiency across a digital product's user interface including buttons, drop-downs and links and more.

Visual Storytelling: Comfort with creating and presenting coherent and emotionally engaging stories through visual and verbal elements, making it easier for the audiences to understand and remember.

Art Direction: Able to guide and communicate the visual and creative aspects of a project, making decisions about design, aesthetics, and style to ensure a cohesive and visually appealing outcome.

User Interface Design: Knowledge of standard usability principles, and the process for creating responsive interfaces, including sketching, wireframing, and clickable prototyping for web and mobile platforms.

Digital Illustration: Effective in in creating digital illustrations, iconography, and vector graphics, and how to optimize them for use in websites, apps, and other media.

Motion Graphics: Has experimented with motion design, including the creation of animations, GIFs, and other dynamic digital content.

Data Visualization: Able to interpret and effectively present data through visuals including selecting appropriate chart types, creating graphs, and displaying data clearly and understandably.

Digital Asset Management: Capable of organizing and managing digital assets efficiently, ensuring easy access and version control of design files, selecting appropriate file formats for sharing and publishing.

- Broad design competencies & soft skills

Proficient, capable and constantly improving:

Client Relationship Management: Listens carefully to clients to internalize their point of view, and responding thoughtfully to feedback resulting in stronger client relationships and understanding.

Business acumen: Learns the nature of clients' domains or businesses, the problems they bring, and the financial implications of design decisions.

Futures Thinking: Engages clients and teams in envisioning and exploring potential future scenarios. Understands evolving user needs and market trends to anticipate and shape what's next.

Responsive design: Understands user behavior across devices, and designs interfaces that adapt seamlessly to various screens, ensuring consistent aesthetics and functionality, from expansive desktop displays to compact mobile screens.

Rapid Prototyping: Quickly creates working models or representations of a design concept. Materialize ideas with speed, enabling immediate feedback and iterative refinement.

Analytical Skills: Able to gather, interpret, and evaluate information to understand complex issues and make informed decisions. Break down problems, identifying patterns, and drawing meaningful insights from information.

User Centered Design: Able to integrate insights from UX research, heuristic standards and visual aesthetics to create solutions that are intuitive, engaging, and accessible.

Design Thinking: Engage and facilitate clients in a user-centric approach: discover and understand user needs; define key pain points and opportunities; brainstorm diverse solutions; rapidly prototype to make the solution come to life, and iterative test.

Presentation skills: Communicate design concepts and narratives, centering on user needs in a way that garners empathy for the end user and appeals to clients' business objectives.

Time & Project Management: Effectively prioritizes time on projects to tackle the most important tasks. Sets realistic deadlines, balances creative exploration with productivity.

Adaptability & Agility: Respond and adjust creatively and effectively to changing trends, user needs, and technological advancements. Act in a flexible manner in thought and approach, embrace new ideas, and continuously deliver in the face of change.

Cross-functional collaboration: Work successfully with a multidisciplinary team by actively listening, effectively conveying ideas, and integrating diverse expertise—from user research insights to technical feasibility—into a unified, innovative design solution.

Software Tool Use: Proficiency with industry-standard digital user interface design tools like Figma and Sketch, and prototyping capabilities therein. Proficiency with Adobe Creative Suite (Illustrator, Photoshop, InDesign), and exploratory use of emerging technologies for generative imagery and art.

- Qualifications

Education

Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Graphic Design, UX / Interaction Design, Computer Graphics, Art & Design, or related field & really strong portfolio.

Experience

2.5 to 4 years working with clients on digital products and experiences as demonstrated through a well-designed portfolio that showcases a range of successful visual design projects.

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