Design Director

The design team at Underbelly is central to the awesome work we produce with our clients. We’re a multidisciplinary team specializing in user experience, interface design, branding, motion, and illustration. We help solve complex problems for some of the world’s leading companies in addition to helping small businesses get new products and brands off the ground. We’re passionate, cooperative, thoughtful, respectful, and always pushing ourselves and our craft. At Underbelly we care about people and making their lives better through design.

As the Design Director, you are responsible for ensuring that our teams create beautiful and useful digital experiences for our clients and their customers. You do this through working closely with our mutlidisciplinary designers and other cross-functional roles on a daily basis. You’ll help estimate new work and plan staff and resources accordingly. You'll make sure that as we kick off projects, there is a well defined problem, clear scope, and thorough research completed through discovery. Having context on each project, you provide each designer with ongoing feedback, critique, and direction to help them narrow in on the right solution while considering customer needs and business objectives. In short, you help our design team be successful through intentional coaching, thoughtful mentorship, and strong leadership.

All that said, believe it or not we like to keep a pretty fun, laid back atmosphere here at the ‘Belly. We are looking for someone who is not only an awesome designer but a good fit for our close-knit team.

What You'll Do

• As a principal designer you contribute to strategic client projects by doing strong user experience, interaction, and visual design
• Intentionally and actively mentor our design team on UX methodology, principles, and processes; including best practices for research and validation
• Work with the Creative Director, Art Director, and lead designers to plan project kickoffs through creating agendas, coordinating meetings, and facilitating discovery sessions – ensuring projects begin successfully
• Lead in biweekly project design reviews alongside the creative team (including Creative and Art Directors)
• Be part of our internal leadership team, contributing to company vision and strategy, and aligning on company/team priorities for each quarter
• Evangelize internal design principles, values, and guidelines to ensure all of our design work is impactful, valuable, and is high quality
• Work with our Director of Business Development to estimate scope and length of engagements as well as forecasting resources
• Actively assign and prioritize work across the team, unblocking individuals so that they can focus on client work
• Directly manage members of the design team, scheduling and facilitating one-on-ones and quarterly reviews
• Coordinate hiring and recruiting efforts with our people team
• Work with other org leads to continue growing a healthy and collaborative culture

You Have

• A strong portfolio showcasing 5+ years of strong human-centered digital product design work featuring beautiful, useful design
• Impeccable written and verbal communication skills
• Proven industry experience leading design teams to successful outcomes
• Demonstrable experience through the full cycle of product design, especially research, discovery, and validation
• A very solid understanding of visual design fundamentals; typography, color, grid, space, and composition
• Expert level proficiency with relevant design tools and applications
• An earnest desire to solve complex problems for people in innovative and interesting ways 
• A collaborative, humble nature

Perks

• Location: work in downtown Salt Lake City in our new studio, minutes from the beautiful outdoors
• People: a passionate and talented team of collaborators who are serious about their work (but don’t take themselves too seriously)
• Workstation gear: a standing desk, Aeron chair, MacBook Pro & 4K display
• Conference stipend: we pay up to $1,500 a year for any role/skill-related conference you would like to attend
• Venture: this is a unique opportunity to pitch and work on your own product idea for at least 3 months (ask us about this)
• Hack days: we like to invest in our team – learn something new, write an article, explore techniques, play with new tools and tech
• Enjoy yourself: a fun culture, frequent off-sites, company retreats, foosball, and plenty of free food, coffee, nitro cold brew, and beer (not required)

What You’ll Get

• Money (competitive salary + quarterly profit sharing)
• Health, dental, and vision benefits
• Flexible paid time off
• Life Insurance
• 401k
• Paid holidays
• Relocation support