Digital Designer, Lifestyle (Temporary)

We are looking for a digital graphic designer to join the lifestyle team, including Eater, Punch, and Thrillist, at Vox Media. We’re looking for someone who is innovative, tenacious, grounded, and excited by the idea of creating thoughtful and intriguing visuals that complement our storytelling across mediums.

Eater covers local restaurant news, reports on national food trends, and provides service through travel guides, cooking content, documentary-style video, and social-first stories, as well as live events. Thrillist functions as the go-to guide for passion-led travel, focussing coverage on where experience meets culture—including art, history, food and drink, nightlife, the internet, the outdoors, and more. Punch is dedicated to all-encompassing coverage of drinks and drinking culture, hosting an extensive recipe database, buying guides, how-to’s and hacks, as well as feature stories and behind-the-scenes video. 

The right candidate is always looking for ways to further their technical design skills, is adept at time-managing their own project load, and is laser-focused on details, but also is eager to approach design challenges from a variety of disciplines. We’re specifically eager to bring on a designer well-versed in Ceros or other similar platforms, who can build digital experiences that include photography, graphics, and animation.  

This role is full-time at 40 hours/week.

WHO WE ARE

Vox Media is the leading modern media company. We guide our audience from discovery to obsession. We inspire essential conversations about what’s now, what’s next, and what’s possible.

As a community of journalists and storytellers, business professionals, creators and technologists, we believe it is a moral and business imperative to amplify voices: to cultivate diversity, equity, and inclusion throughout our organization and media. This applies to our candidates, our teams, our storytelling, our creative work, and our platforms, products, and partnerships.

WHAT YOU’LL DO

This Role Will:

• Own design development of onsite and off-platform visual assets while taking creative direction from the Design Director

Your day-to-day, or week-to-week: 

• Execute static social design: Produce a determined cadence of Instagram stories and static post carousels per week for Eater’s national and local channels, Thrillist, Punch, and PS, designing with the primary goals of growing on-platform engagement and driving traffic towards a measurable increase in on-site pageviews.
• Execute animated social design: Occasionally create motion graphics for the aforementioned channels.
• Own and implement each individual brand identity: Deeply familiarize yourself with the brand guidelines for each of the lifestyle pod brands and make connections between these guardrails on paper and the ways the brands exists in the visual world and across social platforms; develop a deep understanding of what is and is not considered on-brand for Eater, Thrillist, Punch, and PS. From there, own the process of periodically refreshing the template designs used team-wide.
• Meld your marketing brain with design prowess: Along with editorial storytelling, you’ll be tasked with ideating on intriguing marketing campaigns to support our commerce vertical and ongoing promotion around the Eater app, transforming those ideas into compelling digital design schemes.
• Consume and share: Consume Eater, Thrillist, Punch, and PS content constantly—read your colleagues’ stories across national and local coverage; stay abreast of conversations in internal trend reporting chats; do so through the lens of what storytelling will work well on our social platforms and bring those ideas to round table with your teammates.

Expect To:

• Collaborate. Work closely and collaborate with Audience Development team members, editorial (reporters and editors), Video, and the Design team to bring multiple possible design solutions to the table and ensure that creative needs are translated and executed appropriately and efficiently.
• Participate in design reviews. Accept and resolve critiques. Attend and participate in bi-weekly 1:1s, as well as project-specific reviews.
• Advocate for accessible design. Follow accessibility guidelines in your work.
• Maintain brand standards. Consistently assess your design solutions with a critical eye, ensuring that they are innovative and intriguing, without straying from the visual brand standards.
• Uphold tidy and organized workspace. Whether it’s how you’re building your design files and naming layers or tagging edited photos and filing them away, you are consistently reliable in how you organize your work.
• Support the lifestyle pod’s commitment to representation. When and where appropriate, always seek design solutions that lift up and celebrate minority voices, views and visuals.
• Communicate. Share, share and over share. Be as transparent as possible with your process, ideas, challenges and wins. Ask for help when you need it!

WHO YOU ARE

• Technical Skillsets: You have at least 1 year’s experience out of school as a professional graphic designer, and the work to speak for it. You are fluent in Adobe Creative Suite; knowledge of additional design software (Ceros, Sketch, Figma, Canva, etc.); have experience designing in ESPs (e.g. SailThru, Mailchimp, Klaviyo, etc.); and have a working knowledge of administrative/CMS software (Google Suite, Dropbox, Airtable, Monday.com, Trello, etc.)
• Efficiency: You are able to efficiently produce a substantial output of content without sacrificing design integrity or visual brand cohesivity which involves a demonstrated ability to autonomously project and time manage your work
• Flexibility: You’re able to work within succinct timelines, and respond to the ever-changing landscape that is media reporting, including quickly executing timely edits on iterative design schemes
• Fluency Around Social Trends: You have a detail-oriented, constantly-evolving “finger on the pulse” of the latest visual trends across popular social media platforms, including Instagram and TikTok, meaning you are consuming content constantly and communicating the commonalities you’re seeing with your team in an effort to sharpen and better the content we create together
• Design Eye: You have a strong understanding of visual design principles, typography, color theory, and layout as they pertain specifically and responsively to different social platforms
• Positive, Collaborative Attitude: You’re able to analyze the tasks in front of you and meet design challenges with demonstrated critical thinking, awareness of various perspectives and attention to optimizing return and engagement; you're eager to learn and expand your own skill set through the work you create

• Animation Skillset: Prior experience building animations and working with video times to integrate animated design is a major plus
• Coding Skillset: Knowledge of HTML, CSS, SCSS and prior, if minimal, experience coding web designs is a plus
• Investment in Reporting: Curiosity towards and investment in food journalism are a major plus

If you think you have what it takes, but don't meet every single point in our job posting, please apply with a cover letter to let us know how you believe you can bring your unique skills to the Vox Media team or get in touch! We would love to have a chat and see if you could be a great addition to our team.

WHERE YOU’LL WORK

This job is remote. We’re dedicated to the health and wellbeing of all of our employees, and when we reopen, will require everyone who works from one of our offices to be fully-vaccinated against COVID-19. Employees with approved religious or medical exemptions may be subject to additional safety requirements, such as submitting to regular COVID-19 testing and/or wearing a face covering in our offices.

Want to know more about what working at Eater is like, or have q’s not answered here? Check out our extensive FAQ.

WHY VOX MEDIA?WHAT WE OFFER

This is a permanent, temporary position. This job is benefits-eligible. We pride ourselves in providing comprehensive benefits to support all of our employees wherever they are in life. You can find more information about our benefits here.

This role is a part of the Vox Media Union, represented by the Writers Guild of America, East

OUR DEI+ COMMITMENT

Vox Media is committed to building an inclusive environment where everyone can show up as their authentic selves and create their best work. We recognize that great stories, platforms, products and services come from people with all manner of backgrounds and experiences. We recognize that our commitments require ongoing work and sustained attention, as well as adaptation to new insights and best practices. We keep our diversity data public for the sake of accountability, transparency and communication. Learn more about our values here, and our approach to corporate citizenship here. 

Vox Media is an Equal Opportunity Employer and qualified applicants will receive consideration without regard to race, color, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, religion, disability, national origin, protected veteran status, age, or any other status protected by applicable national, federal, state, or local law. Vox Media will also consider all qualified applicants with criminal histories in accordance with applicable Fair Chance laws. We are also committed to providing reasonable accommodations as part of the application process to candidates with disabilities. If you require a reasonable accommodation as part of the application process, please contact our People & Culture team ([email protected]).

WHAT COMES NEXT

Our recruiting team will go through applications in a timely manner. Please note that our recruiting team will only contact you from @voxmedia.com email addresses, never via text message. Read more about how our recruiting team operates, and how to protect yourself from recruitment fraud, here.