Kickstarter is searching for a Visual Design Lead to implement and expand a new graphic identity system across a variety of applications, from product to print. Working throughout the organization and across all of our product initiatives, the individual performing this role will build and lead our design team; work closely with product management and engineering to align product with the company’s new graphic identity system; and partner with senior management to shape the visual expression our company's future.

About the Team

Kickstarter’s Design team works on beautiful and functional tools to help our community create, discover, explore, back, and share creative projects. We translate the company’s new identity system into its visual expression and lead identity implementation efforts across a variety of digital, physical and environmental applications. Collaborating closely with the product management and engineering teams, we solve hard problems, ensure a consistent user experience, and push the needle forward for creativity. We work to make Kickstarter more engaging, inspiring and innovative.

About the Role

As Visual Design Lead, you’ll have the opportunity to build and lead a team of graphic designers in their work to positively impact the lives of Kickstarter creators, project backers, and the creative community at large. Your team's work will touch physical and digital mediums, the Kickstarter website, and mobile applications. You will shape and evolve design team culture by acting as your team's roadmap through research, observation, and iteration. The successful candidate can lead their team in applying the visual identity across digital products and beyond.

In This Role, You Must:

• Have a strong working facility as a designer: You are not afraid to “get your hands dirty.”
• Love leading, coaching, mentoring and growing your team. It is imperative that you are comfortable putting in place the structures and processes for a healthy and high-functioning design team.
• Have strong experience recruiting and hiring best-in-class graphic and product designers. This role will include growing the design team beyond its current size.
• Be comfortable partnering and collaborating closely with product and engineering leadership. This includes fostering inter-team collaboration and defining roles and responsibilities for designers as they interface with the broader product team.
• Be comfortable serving as the organization’s creative director, providing strong design leadership and guidance across a variety of applications: You must be willing to push the definition of design within the organization, challenging the company to seek new creative inroads into the communities it serves.
• Be comfortable with standard design practices like design critiques for feedback, wireframing/prototyping of ideas pre-implementation, standard practices to foster ideation, research, and iteration and creation of a component-based design system.

About You

• Significant experience (at minimum 3 years) running a design team, ideally one comprised of graphic designers, visual designers and UX/UI designers
• Proven track record running a design team
• A working designer—either now, or in the past
• A visionary thinker with strong ideas about how graphic design functions within an organization and beyond
• A strong, proven creative director who possesses novel ideas around typography and other design elements
• Possess natural leadership abilities including great communication skills (written, verbal and via presentation) along with the ability to give/receive critical feedback
• Demonstrate a strong command of visual design, intuitive user experience, and strategic problem solving in your design portfolio
• Work well in a fast moving, iterative environment
• Comfortable using data and user research to support design decisions
• Unafraid to change your opinion in the face of new information or understanding of the product goals—you have strong beliefs, but you’re open-minded
• Want to seek out and develop a design process that encourages collaboration between other designers and product teams
• Think creatively when it comes to translating vision and big ideas into meaningful, shippable product
• Value diversity and inclusion in your design process

If this sounds like you, please get in touch. Send us your resume, some links to your work, and a little bit about yourself. This position is full-time and on-site at our beautiful office in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. All full-time employees are eligible for our terrific benefits program, which includes stock options, full health/dental/vision coverage, 401k contribution, generous vacation and family leave, and a wide variety of social and cultural events. About Kickstarter Kickstarter is a Public Benefit Corporation, and our mission is to help bring creative projects to life. We measure our success as a company by how well we achieve that mission, not by the size of our profits. In our charter, we spell out our mission, our values, and the commitments we have made to pursue them.