The role
You’ll lead the design of two or three identities a year, from the first sketch to the guidelines and the hundred things that come after them. You’ll work in a small team with a strategist, a motion designer and a producer, and you’ll present your own work to clients.
Most of our identity work starts with a place, a product or a ritual, not a mood board. Ostra Ferries began with a timetable. Lumen Baths began with the tiles on the pool floor. We’d like you to work the same way: find the thing that belongs to the client and to no one else, then build the system from it.
A week in the role
Monday starts with the studio’s planning hour, when the three projects say where they are and what they need. Most of your week is spent drawing, setting type and testing ideas on real things: a ticket, a sign, a box, a homepage. There’s usually one client session and one crit with Joaquín, and from three on Friday the studio is yours.
What you’ll do
Turn a brief into a handful of genuinely different routes, then make one of them great.
Draw wordmarks and symbols, and build the colour, type and layout systems around them.
Test the identity on real applications early, so the system is shaped by use rather than by a presentation.
Write and design the guidelines, and hand them over in a session the client’s team will remember.
Mentor a designer or two, mostly by working next to them.
What you’ll bring
Six or more years of identity work you’re proud of, including at least two systems you led.
Strong type and drawing skills. You can make a wordmark from scratch.
A calm way of explaining design to people who aren’t designers.
Care for the unglamorous parts: file naming, guidelines and handover.
Comfort sharing unfinished work with the rest of the studio.
Nice to have
Enough motion or 3D to sketch how a mark moves.
Experience with wayfinding or packaging.
A side project you can’t stop talking about.
Who you’ll work with
You’ll report to Joaquín Ferrer, our design director, and sit with Saoirse Kinsella and Liv Haugland on the identity team. Fergus Penhaligon writes the words for most of our identities, Carlota Brandão leads the strategy, and Romilly Hart keeps every project on its timeline.
What we offer
A salary band we share in the first call, reviewed every April.
Four-day weeks in August, on the same pay.
A learning budget every year, and a day a month to spend it.
Home by six. After a late night, the next morning is yours.
From three on Fridays, the studio is yours for your own work.
No unpaid pitches, ever.
A laptop, a good chair and the tools you ask for.
How to apply
Send a short note and the three projects you’re proudest of, with a sentence on what you did on each. No cover letters, no forms.
We reply to everyone within three working days. If it looks like a fit, you’ll talk to Joaquín for half an hour, then spend a paid day in the studio on a small, real brief with the team. You’ll hear our answer, with the reasons for it, within a week of that day.
