Design Lead

CONDÉ NAST; Greater London; On-site; GBP 55,000 - 75,000; Full time

Job summary

A leading media company in London seeks a Product Design Lead to enhance the visual quality and storytelling of its iconic brands' digital experiences. The role involves collaborating with various teams to ensure brand consistency while delivering innovative design solutions. The ideal candidate will have a strong background in editorial design, a passion for storytelling, and proficiency in design tools like Figma and GitHub. This opportunity is perfect for someone who thrives in a creative yet structured environment and seeks to make a tangible impact.

Qualifications

• Experience in editorial design and storytelling.
• Strong creative brand sensitivity.
• Familiarity with CMS-driven design environments.

Responsibilities

• Elevate visual quality of websites.
• Partner with teams to align brand and platform.
• Champion design excellence within the design system.
• Deliver hands-on quality improvements.

Skills

editorial design

storytelling

system thinking

visual judgement

communication

Tools

Figma

GitHub

Job description

Condé Nast is a global media company producing the highest quality content with a footprint of more than 1 billion consumers in 32 territories through print, digital, video and social platforms. The company's portfolio includes many of the world's most respected and influential media properties including Vogue, Vanity Fair, Glamour, Self, GQ, The New Yorker, Condé Nast Traveler/Traveller, Allure, AD, Bon Appétit and Wired, among others.

Job Description

Location: London, GB

Condé Nast is a global media company, home to iconic brands including Vogue, GQ, Glamour, CN Traveller, Vanity Fair, Wired, The World of Interiors, House & Garden and Tatler, among many others.

We are headquartered in New York and London and operate in 32 markets worldwide, with a footprint of more than 1 billion consumers across print, digital, video and social platforms.

Condé Nast thrives on collaboration, and our teams come together in the office four days a week (Monday - Thursday).

We value diversity of background, views and cultures. We celebrate people for their personal qualities, skills and contributions, recognising the power our brands have to influence and shape culture.

About Condé Nast Technology

Condé Nast Technology builds the products, systems, and experiences that power our brands. Our mission is to enable creativity and business growth through next‑generation publishing, loyalty, and commerce platforms.

We're a global team of designers, engineers, product managers, and researchers dedicated to creating innovative, user‑centric products that enable world‑class storytelling and digital experiences.

You’ll be part of a talented international team working across London, New York, and ten other markets, collaborating daily with colleagues in Product, Engineering, Architecture, Design, UX, and Data. We partner closely with Consumer Marketing, Commercial, Licensing, Editorial, and Brand teams to ensure our tools and experiences deliver real impact.

Together, we’re shaping how our brands create, publish, and connect with audiences worldwide, combining craft, technology, and collaboration to deliver quality at scale.

About Our Design Team

Our team is experienced in visual design, ux design, interaction design, and design research. We partner closely with editorial, product management, engineering, and business partners to strategise, design, and launch ambitious digital products. We believe that a well‑formed design culture is essential to delivering top‑notch work.

You’ll thrive in this role if:

• You have a genuine love for editorial design and storytelling - you understand the role design plays in how stories are expressed and experienced
• You move easily between system and brand thinking, understanding how shared components underpin consistency, and where to stretch them to deliver distinctive moments
• You are confident speaking the language of both brand teams (Creative Directors, Editors) and engineers, being able to navigate both creative and technical conversations. You’re equally comfortable in Figma and GitHub.
• You are outcome‑oriented and are able to bring initiative and a self‑starter attitude.
• You’re familiar with CMS‑driven design environments and multi‑brand complexity.
• You are passionate about your craft - you have a strong eye for hierarchy, typography, and composition, and an instinct for orchestrating these to create delightful interactions.
• You are curious about new tools, what AI means for our craft, and how our brands and experiences will continue to evolve, always looking for smarter, more creative ways to design and deliver quality.
• You’re a strong communicator - you communicate clearly and collaborate openly, giving and receiving feedback with equal care.

What we’d like to see (Portfolio & Experience evidence)

• Strong creative brand sensitivity and how you interpret and express a brand identity within shared design systems or structured frameworks.
• Editorial and content‑led design with examples of how you design for storytelling, hierarchy, and content‑rich journeys, ideally within digital publishing or media contexts.
• System fluency and how you’ve refined or extended design systems, component libraries, or configuration layers to elevate quality and brand expression.
• Craft range through work that spans from clean, systematic interfaces to expressive, identity‑led experiences.
• Implementation quality with evidence that your design intent carried through to production; how you’ve worked with engineers or used tools (Figma, configs, tokens) to ensure fidelity.
• Visual judgement and examples showing confident hierarchy, rhythm, motion, and composition - with a clear point of view on what “great” looks like online.
• Curiosity and progression, including signs that you stay current, experiment with new tools or technologies (including AI), and push your craft forward.

Condé Nast is an equal opportunity employer. We evaluate qualified applicants without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, veteran status, age, familial status and other legally protected characteristics.

The Role

Our brands are our USP. The expression of our iconic brands - from Vogue to the New Yorker - within their digital experiences is of utmost importance in our mission to create the best places to consume and interact with our brands.

We are looking for a Product Design Lead to help us bring to life our brands' unique personalities across our websites, toeing the line between consistency and distinction. You’ll work across multiple brands, using new or existing capabilities in our design system to improve the storytelling, finesse, and distinctiveness of our digital experiences.

This role sits at the intersection of system and story, taking what we’ve built and making it better through focus, craft, and attention to detail. You’ll move fast, get hands‑on, and make tangible improvements across our front‑end at scale. This isn’t a management role; it’s a senior IC position for someone who can design, finesse, and implement independently while building trusted partnerships across editorial, design, product, and engineering.

What will you be doing?

Elevating visual quality

You focus on the visual standard of our sites, ensuring every interaction, layout, and detail feels deliberate, cohesive, and premium - driving improvements in typography, rhythm, and composition to create experiences that are refined and unmistakably Condé Nast.

Partnering across teams

You build trusted partnerships across design, editorial, product, and engineering to align brand ambition with platform capability. You translate editorial and creative goals into actionable design improvements that strengthen both storytelling and usability.

Crafting with systems thinking

You champion design excellence within the parameters of a shared system. You balance brand expression with scalability and performance, ensuring component use remains consistent, purposeful, and high‑quality.

Delivering hands‑on impact

You take ownership of tangible quality improvements across our brands. You move quickly and independently, identifying and executing high‑value design opportunities that elevate our products.

Championing design culture

You model craft, curiosity, and clarity through your work. You set the standard for what “good” looks like, mentoring through example and helping to raise the collective bar across the design organisation.

Who you are:

You move easily between system and brand thinking, understanding how shared components underpin consistency, and how to stretch them to deliver distinctive brand expression. You value clarity, rhythm, and restraint, and you know that craft is often what separates good from great.

Does this sound like you?

Please upload your CV and cover letter/portfolio, which highlights why you’d love to take on this role and why you’re a great match for what we’re looking for.

We value the time and effort behind every application. All submissions are reviewed by a member of our talent team - we don’t use AI‑assisted technology to review applications.