Midweight Designer (Design Lead)
The Role:
Do you find yourself constantly coming up with ideas that you just want to explore and share? Do you love bringing innovative and cutting-edge design into your work? Do you want the opportunity to work in a creative team that focuses solely on social impact projects? If this sounds like you, you could be what we’re looking for.
Hi! We’re Shape History, a social impact communications agency based in London and we’re looking for a Design Lead with ideally 4+ years’ of experience looking to enhance their creative skills in a fast growing, purpose-led agency. We work with our partners (we call our clients ‘partners’) – charities, businesses, UN bodies, academic institutions, and philanthropic organisations – on some of the biggest issues facing humanity today, from Climate Change to Gender Equality, Digital Health to Human Rights.
This is a fantastic opportunity to have the creative freedom to ideate and design brand identities, campaigns and digital/physical assets for our social impact partners. The role will allow you to develop creative directions, work in different design mediums, build up your portfolio and work collaboratively with our creative team of designers, ideators, UI/UX specialists, and motion designers.
How you’ll be shaping history everyday…
- Collaboration: You will collaborate with the creative team and actively participate in brainstorming to develop concepts that inspire new ideas and fuel social impact using digital and print media. Liaising with members of the planning and strategy teams to ensure the outputs developed by yourself and the designers are cohesive across different areas.
- Design: You will develop concepts and creative directions for brand and campaign assets, and use strategic and behavioural analysis to inform your work. You will create static graphics, infographics, reports, brand books and asset packages, image banks, photo edits, toolkits, event and physical assets, and social media content for our partners.
- Presenting: You will present your design concepts and final ideas, including brand guidelines (fonts, images, colours, text and layout) to our partners. You will also be creating and leading workshops for partners, virtually and in person.
- Organisation: Managing and organising your own tasks, taking ownership of your responsibilities, ensuring you update our planners (account managers) on your deadlines. This will involve ensuring that a design project remains within scope, time and budget. You will also be aware of the workloads of your mentees and support them in finding solutions when they are overcapacity. When we need to outsource creative work to freelancers, you are able to brief them and oversee their work alongside planners.
- Quality oversight: Reviewing varied pieces of design work and signing off on them once they’re of the highest quality, both from a conceptual and technical standpoint. This involves confidently making creative suggestions to improve work done by yourself and your team while also pushing our partners past the boundaries of creativity and developing ideas that will resonate with various audiences.
- Strategic mindset: You will understand the needs of our partners, what they’re trying to achieve and their audiences. You will lead and oversee projects in collaboration with our strategy team, ensuring that our creative output is impact- and outcome-focused. This would include desk research, info downloads, and running workshops that ensure partners’ strategic insights and needs are considered when building visual identities for brands and campaigns.
- Pushing creative boundaries: Keep up to date with design and multimedia trends and the latest developments in software tools, thinking about ways to improve the creative team’s skills and efficiency.
You’re good at…
- Designer experience: You have at least 4 years of experience in a design role. With this, you will have knowledge of the branding process and designing for different outputs in digital and physical spaces.
- Project and time management: You are responsive and comprehensive in your project management approach, feeling comfortable speaking with our partners. You are able to effectively organise how to divide your time between specific projects and activities, balancing the art of flexibility with realism.
- Collaboration: Working collaboratively in a team, as well as independently, and willing to roll up your sleeves during short intensive sprints.
- Open-minded: Willing to step outside your comfort zone, and work on a variety of new and different outputs to evolve your skill sets.
- Stress Management and Adaptability: You feel comfortable adapting your planned course of action when unexpected issues arise, and are able to effectively manage and surpass stressful situations. This involves managing a complex and reactive workload.
- Clarity and simplification: With your experience of leading meetings, you will feel comfortable presenting ideas to the internal team or our partners in an engaging way that resonates and creates clarity and alignment.
- Familiarity with creative software: You are familiar with the Adobe Suite, confident in using Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign. You are adaptable in working with software our partners use such as Canva, Microsoft and Google Suite, and are open to exploring programs that help improve our team’s efficiency.
- Proactivity: Taking ownership and autonomy over your work, solving problems that others may not have noticed, and going out of your way to continue learning and growing.
- Eye for detail: You can be trusted to look over pieces of work and give clear and critical feedback that helps improve the overall quality of outputs. You are confident in signing off on pieces of work before they go live.
Extra bit of awesome:
- Sector-specific: Knowledge and background in the social impact/charity/political sector, whether that be volunteering or working with charities, campaigns, NGOs, funders, or institutions.
- Beyond graphic design: To be able to demonstrate a good understanding of behavioural design, knowledge of persona mapping and audience data strategy as it pertains to design. Also, a knowledge of film, animation and other multi-media workflows relating to design.
- Agency experience: Previous agency experience will allow you to understand how the sector works and how to prioritise your different tasks.
- Communication skills: Being able to write and present your creative ideas in order to tell emotive stories with your work.
- Any other design specialisms: Do you enjoy illustrating? Creative storytelling? Experience design? While these wouldn’t be part of your day-to-day role, these are great traits to have when thinking about a multi-disciplinary creative approach!
Race Equity:
We are committed to having an inclusive culture in which everyone feels safe and supported to achieve their potential. There is a long way to go in implementing race equity in the sector and we have a robust strategy in place for delivering this at Shape History. We actively encourage applications from underrepresented and minority groups, including those with lived experience of social issues we are working to address.
Remuneration:
Base salary of £33,000 -£36,000 per annum + discretionary personal and company bonus.
Recruitment process:
As part of our process, we use blind recruitment in our first round of applications. This is part of a wider race equity strategy at Shape History. When applying for this role, you will be taken to a Typeform link where you’ll be asked a series of questions.
Applications open on Monday 14th August and close on Wednesday 30th August at 10am BST.
We will proceed with sharing a short task to a select few candidates, who will be guaranteed an interview at the start of September.
