Designer

Position Overview

The designer executes on deliverables set forth by senior Creative team members and clients, bringing their unique and fresh perspective to projects. They collaborate closely with project team members in order to have a confident approach to their designs. Through participation in learning sessions in order to create intentional designs, they strategically implement feedback, and deliver work on time and on budget while juggling multiple priorities.

Your team

This role is under the Creative team. The Designer will report to the Creative Director.

Departmental capacities: 

• Collaborative Team Orientation: You are collaborative and ready to help other people, even if it's not in our field of expertise. You share resources, inspiration, and ideas. You are considerate of people's time and help create systems that are flexible, ensure better outcomes, and support everyone to do our best possible work together. You are willing to jump into casual and lively coworking with clients and colleagues when needed. You are ready to help and support your colleagues, and reach out for help when you need it. You value diverse perspectives and help bring a wide range of perspectives, talents, and skills to the table. You recognize that a team with varied backgrounds contributes to the strength of our creativity. 
• Curiosity and Continuous Learning: You display curiosity and eagerness through research and implementation to find new ways to make our designs interesting. You take responsibility for your own growth and development by constantly seeking to improve. You share what you know with your colleagues and are honest about what you don't know. 
• Detail Orientation: You take a thorough approach and display concern for all aspects involved in design, no matter how small, to infuse delight and excitement into the user experience. You create high quality work with subtle touches that make a design unique, interesting, and ownable to the client. You know how to use details, such as animation, to gently guide a user, providing cues that help people explore and quickly access the information they need. You understand how the details add up to the whole design, and how to find and accentuate our clients' differentiators to produce a unique and interesting design that's tailored to each client's needs.
• Purposeful Design: You seek to understand our clients, their work, and how they do that work. You are creative and thoughtful in the solutions you design because you care about their audiences and users. You understand the "why" behind our projects and integrate it into effective designs that help our clients create positive social change. You design beautiful and useful solutions for our clients and partners, knowing when to push design because you understand the purpose behind it. You can create a fresh, modern, and innovative take on a client's brand, while still being practical, unpretentious, and acceptable to stakeholders who will need to buy into the design.
  
  

Responsibilities

Project work and client engagement (80%) 

Serve as the primary executor of design deliverables on one-off projects and retainers as set forth by senior creative team members.

• Consistently prepare and present quality presentations to clients based in a framework to help organizations understand how we meet audience goals, business objectives, and maintenance of what is being produced
• Implement feedback with an eye for detail and strategic application per briefs
• Conduct quality assurance, testing, and proofing on project deliverables in preparation for presentation/deliverables 
• Without much support, consistently and confidently training & educating clients navigating interactions with them whether through email or “in-person” guiding them through deliverables and expected steps in the process so they can make informed decisions. 
• Reading, absorbing background materials, relevant client communications to thoughtfully participate in learning sessions, workshops and brainstorming sessions.
• Act as support or production designer within random one-off requests outside of set client projects to create additional concepts, collateral, and/or using best-practice knowledge to build on existing deliverables. 

Project management and inter-departmental collaboration (10%) 

• Actively being a leader within the design team to set a tone of collaboration with enthusiasm in brainstorms and inspiration setting.
• Review design briefs and deliverables with Art Directors with an ownership mindset, ensuring a thorough and complete understanding of assigned projects and tasks so that you can be additive to the design process & vision 
• Setting meetings, reviews, and asking questions and guidance to get what is needed for a thoughtful pacing of project work (i.e. not sending deep questions/work the day before for review) 
• Expert at juggling multiple priorities knowing when and how to move between projects to meet various deadlines 
• Over-communicating and collaborate informally and formally with internal and external project team members to create innovative solutions using their expertise and knowledge to further refine concepts
• Have a showing vs. telling mindset that sets team members up for success and quality collaboration

Facilitate learning and process development (10%) 

• Maintain, use and implement process & methodology set forth by creative team members that help gain efficiencies within projects (Figma, Brand, etc.)
• Provide feedback to Art Directors when process & methodology is inefficient, unclear or causes roadblocks for project teams & clients
• Actively create case studies, marketing materials and support teal business development by producing showcases of our work

Required Skills

• Strong proficiency in Adobe Creative Suite
• Solid foundational knowledge and understanding of UX best practices and design principles
• Solid understanding of the process of how to develop a brand’s visual identity through expanding on foundational brand elements via a brands key differentiators
• Produce design deliverables (logo concepts, visual identity, brand guides, collateral,  etc,) as specified by the project
• Solid foundational knowledge of Google Slides/PPT, Figma, and Canva 
• Comfort trying new tools and skills, such as basic video editing, Mailchimp email template design, etc. 
• Comfort experimenting with AI tools. (Read our article about the design team’s approach and stance on generative AI)
• Produce design deliverables (print reports, slide decks, Canva graphics, document templates, digital ads, merchandise, etc.) as specified by the project

Additional Skills:

Though not required, these skillsets are an added bonus:

• Illustration
• Motion design/animation
• Strong AI proficiency/ability to create skills in Claude/ChatGPT

At Teal, we have each other’s backs. This means occasionally taking on responsibilities, tasks, and special projects that are not a core part of your job description. No one is above any task. We are all committed to helping each other out to succeed as a whole.  In the words of Minnesota Senator Paul Wellstone, “We all do better when we all