Are you a UI designer whose creativity just can’t stop driving you to make user interfaces that inspire, engage and endure?
What if you had the chance to help shape the very future of online design education?
We’ve got news for you: this may be the opportunity you’ve been waiting for.
We’re proud to say that we’ve put together an amazing team of unicorns who support, inspire and challenge each other every day. We’re lucky enough to get up each day and build a better future for thousands of people around the world. What’s more, we’ve woven our commitment to the fusion of idealism, high performance and excellence into our company culture. But something’s missing. And we think it could be you.
The IxDF (Interaction Design Foundation) is the biggest online design school globally. Entering our third decade and with over 170,000 graduates, we’re market leaders in online design education. That’s because the world’s leading experts create our content and because we’re specialized in—and utterly dedicated to—design and only design. What’s more, with over 1.5 million monthly visitors, we’re at the forefront of providing premier design education to such organizations as IBM and SAP, as well as thousands of other companies.
This is a paid full-time position and is fully remote so you can work from anywhere. You will have daily video-based contact with your colleagues and get to meet them physically on team trips a few times per year.
What will you be doing?
Your first task will be to help us with a specific, special, and long-overdue project: a complete platform redesign. We teach great design, yet we haven't updated or redesigned our own platform in seven years (don’t worry, the irony isn’t lost on us either). Back then, our design system was cutting-edge, but a lot has changed since then.
No more waiting. Now, we're ready to take our own advice and go all-in on redesigning our platform, bringing it back up to the level of excellence it deserves. We're excited about this because it's something we've been looking forward to for years. Fortunately, we're well-prepared: our design system is organized and primed for enhancement, our back-end code is flawless, our front-end code is on track, and our team of developers is eager to show off their capabilities. Now, all we need is you to complete the picture.
Therefore, ahead of you is a highly rewarding and enriching journey on which you will make an impact on the global design community, as well as strengthen your own design skills:
- Your initial task will be to transition our core flows into Figma, using advanced functionalities like components and design tokens to ensure our design system's scalability, efficiency, and reusability. We have historically used Sketch and Zeplin, with a rich repository of design rationale and annotations for each screen that you will need to adeptly incorporate into your Figma setup.
- After successfully organizing our design system and major flows within Figma, you'll shift focus to the finer details of visual design. You’ll participate in a visual redesign of our platform, and this involves meticulous attention to all the nitty-gritty of shadows, border sizes, and the dynamics of interactivity, ensuring every element contributes to the sum of all details, and the broader visual language.
- Continually maintain and grow our platform’s design system and hold the development team accountable for maintaining its code.
- Play a growing role in evolving the IxDF brand identity, implementing the visual design language across all touch points. Our video team has hundreds of pages of guidelines for video visuals, presenting ample challenges and opportunities for you.
- Shape and refine UIs, copy, microcopy, communication, etc. so that we improve the biggest force of growth we have: The better we serve our members’ true needs, the more we grow.
- If you also have a passion for UX, and not just UI design, you can, in time:
- help create and improve user experiences in core areas of our educational platform.
- work with user insights and data to craft the best online educational experience in the world.
- work with the development team, growth team and member support teams to create and implement ideas that solve the needs of our members.
- Harness the ultimate magic of design: making our viewers and readers forget about their devices, so they can absorb our resources seamlessly. True design bliss.
- Help us attain and maintain our vision as the world’s premier design education resource via a solution whose look, feel, functionality and more can’t be faulted… but always have room for improvement under your watchful eye. With your help, we will never need to wait another 7 years before taking care of our platform design, and will stay on top of our game for decades to come.
Want even more challenges? If you're willing to do the hard work of learning and growing, you’ll find virtually limitless opportunities waiting for you on the road ahead.
About You
- You have many years of hands-on experience with UI design.
- You excel in advanced visual design skills, including mastery of typographic hierarchy, grid systems, color psychology, and micro-interactions, with an unyielding attention to pixel-perfect details.
- You are highly skilled in Figma, adept at leveraging its full suite of features such as auto-layout, variant components, and design tokens to create scalable and maintainable design systems.
- Your problem-solving acumen in visual design is top-tier, skillfully refining UI elements to enhance both user engagement and visual harmony.
- Your collaborative spirit thrives in multidisciplinary settings, where you synchronize design efforts with engineers, product managers, and content strategists to deliver cohesive user experiences.
- Your responsibilities will range widely, so you must be adept at dividing broad duties into small, executable tasks and not lose sight of your overall mission. “Getting stuff done” is your middle name.
- You are results-driven and motivated by achievement and goals. Mediocrity gives you the chills. You know that ideas are worthless without execution, and you instantly get frustrated when people “talk too much and do too little”.
- You’re a practical idealist. You strive for perfection in everything you do, while understanding the delays that can come with waiting for something to be perfect. You know when to create results through incremental quick wins and MVPs, and when to go all in to create something perfect.
- You are based within the EMEA time zone, which is crucial to ensure optimal collaboration and overlapping working hours.
What can we offer?
- A full-time position, within a fully remote organization. Daily video-based contact with your colleagues from elsewhere on the planet, and you’ll get to meet them on team trips 1–2 times per year.
- Forget fluffy titles, political agendas and corporate drama. Your colleagues value your character, work ethic, and what you actually achieve. Junior or senior, if you embody old-school virtues of always striving to become the best version of yourself, you'll thrive at the IxDF.
- Work with a highly scalable impact-driven model where we’ve consistently created more than 50% growth year-on-year since 2013. Bootstrapped with zero investment capital but built purely on consistency over time and the conviction that affordable design education can improve the quality of life of humankind.
- Work in a company where the distance between idea and execution is minimal. We’re a highly agile organisation with zero bureaucracy or corporate politics – but with a high level of orderliness and efficiency.
- Have the chance to feel the impact of helping an ever-growing design education brand empower and enrich the lives of millions of people.
- Work in a company culture where idealism meets high performance and excellence. To help us improve the world (and yourself in the process), you’ll need grit, work ethic, long-term thinking, and self-discipline.
- Work with people who have a hands-on attitude and a bias toward action rather than fluff-filled, unrealistic strategies. You’ll need crisp execution skills yourself and the ability to impress your colleagues with concrete results, just as they’ll impress you.
