Editorial Designer

**About The Ken**:

- The Ken’s_ Editorial Design team produces original, distinctive and intelligent infographics, visualisations and illustrations for our subscribers and readers. Join us if you want to work alongside India’s most talented and diverse set of journalists, editors and designers. And if you want to innovate and evolve each day as a visual storyteller.

**About the role**:
As an Editorial Designer & Illustrator, you will translate complex ideas, words, and numbers into informative, simple, and beautiful visuals. Because our stories and newsletters are deeply reported and feature distinctive narratives that often run into thousands of words, we are committed to making detailed, high-calibre data visualisations that make our stories more accessible to our subscribers. But, just like our distinct narratives, our graphics go beyond simple bar graphs and pie charts to visually depict company strategies and non-numerical information.

Here are a few recent examples of our infographics:
“Flipkart’s problem with 15-minute delivery: it’s great at two-day shipping”

“Red Bull is the energy drink of the world. How did Pepsico make Sting the energy drink of India?”

“A BTech in AI may soon trump a BTech in CompSci as IITians’ top choice”

And here are some examples of our original illustrations that help our subscribers visualize the underlying ideas or conflicts in our stories in interesting ways.

No one knows how Cibil rates your finances. Not even your bank

Visa slots for sale: how Indian travel agents game VFS, consulates

What does it take to sell makeup to men?

In addition, you will also work closely with the team, the reporters, and the editors to create rich illustrations that support the content, style and tone of the story.

As a team, we have ambitious plans for more data-driven stories, graphic-only stories, interactive/programmatic visualisations, and other standalone visuals. You will have the opportunity to collaborate and contribute your ideas to help shape and execute these projects.

Because we consider our visual journalism as important as our textual or audio products, we also publish our infographics & data visualizations as a separate and independent product, called “Visual Stories”.

**About you**:
Proficiency in software like Affinity Designer, Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Photoshop, Procreate required.

**What we offer**:
One of our tenets is to offer the most competitive salaries and meaningful benefits we can to our colleagues.

Great salaries

The latest Apple Macbooks

A flat, non-hierarchical and open culture

A universal ESOP plan

Health insurance for you and your family

Cutting-edge learning opportunities, whether it be on journalism or subscriptions products

Unlimited leaves

Additionally, we offer a unique work experience for our designers in these ways:
1. Attribution — Designers are as much a part of the editorial process as editors and writers. While a story narrative progresses across different drafts, the designers and writers work in tandem to create unique infographics and illustrations that form standalone stories of their own. Because of the creativity and effort this process entails, every visual carries a designer attribution and is therefore in the public eye.

3. Teamwork — We believe that every design team member gets to shape the language of design for The Ken with their individual strengths and skill sets.

**Compensation**:
**Desirable attributes**:
Self-driven and ambitious — The success of this role is driven by what the owner makes of it. The charter is limitless and there are few obstacles (except time and bandwidth).

Bottom-up, first principles thinking — There are no replicable templates or strategies to the design team at The Ken. The path to helping build a design team with a distinct identity in a media company requires deep, foundational thinking and understanding of design principles.

Creativity — The problems that we intend to solve need a lot of creativity and out of the box thinking. Execution of our ideas needs to feel fresh, authentic and deeply personal. These form part of our core brand identity.

Communication and Storytelling — Fundamentally, we are a product that tells stories. Your role is to tell stories as simply and effectively as possible through visuals and data.

Execution-focused — We prioritise doing, and work in short, quick turnaround cycles.

Tenacity / Perseverance - We value the consistent reward of passionately striving to achieve results. We also admire a reputation for not giving up.

Excellence / Ownership - We set ourselves high standards of performance and expect the same of our teammates. You are expected to have a high sense of responsibility along with a drive to work outside your comfort zone.

Team Player - The Ken design team is known for being approachable and we attribute this to our ability to overcome we-they. We value teammates that reach out to peers and are excited about collaboration.

Understand