Digital Designer – Creative Agency

Stride; Chester; Hybrid; GBP 30,000 - 42,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

27 days holiday plus bank holidays (in

Christmas break

Flexible/hybrid working

Stride Inspiration Days

Small, friendly team

City centre studio in Chester

Cycle to Work scheme

Job summary

Stride is a Chester-based independent branding and digital studio seeking a digital designer to lead brand-led websites and digital experiences. You’ll work from concept through development, shaping site structures, user journeys, typography and interaction across projects for a diverse client base.

You’ll collaborate with a tight-knit team including a Creative Director, designers, developers and SEO specialists.

Qualifications

• Strong portfolio of digital and website design work.
• Excellent visual design skills with typography, layout and detail.
• Solid understanding of UX/UI principles and usability balance.
• Experience thinking beyond pages to user journeys and site structure.
• Experience contributing to client discovery workshops.

Responsibilities

• Design distinctive, brand-led websites and digital experiences in Figma from concepts to responsive UX/UI.
• Explore how brands come to life online via typography, imagery, layout, interaction and movement.
• Plan user journeys, sitemaps, information architecture and wireframes; advise on structure and content.
• Participate in discovery workshops to understand business, audiences and goals.
• Collaborate with copywriters to develop content alongside design.
• Present concepts to clients and respond constructively to feedback.
• Create reusable components and design systems for development.
• Work with developers to balance creativity with technical feasibility; review final site.
• Explore interaction and motion where meaningful to the user experience.
• Develop digital work for existing clients and occasional campaigns.

Skills

Brand-led design

UX/UI principles

Typography

Layout

Information architecture

Wireframes

Client discovery workshops

Responsive design

Collaboration with developers

WordPress

AI tools in workflow

Branding agency experience

Tools

Figma

Webflow

WordPress

CMS

Job description

We’re looking for a digital designer to add to our small creative team. Someone with strong ideas, great design instincts and a real understanding of how to bring brands to life online.

This is a creative-led role for someone who wants to design work that's both beautiful and genuinely useful.

You’ll take a leading role in the websites and digital experiences we create, working from the very beginning of a project to help understand the brief, the business and its audiences. You’ll help shape site structures and user journeys before bringing everything together through thoughtful, brand-led UX and UI design.

We want someone who can take a brand and think about how it should come to life digitally - through typography, imagery, layout, interaction, movement and ideas.

You’ll work closely with our Creative Director, designers, developers, SEO specialist, copywriter and clients to take projects from initial thinking through design and into development and launch.

We’re a small studio, so there will always be variety. Digital will be your specialism, but you’ll also have opportunities to contribute creatively across a wide range of studio projects.

What you’ll be doing

• Designing distinctive, brand-led websites and digital experiences in Figma, from early concepts through to responsive UX and UI
• Exploring how brands come to life online through typography, imagery, layout, interaction and movement
• Planning user journeys, sitemaps, information architecture and wireframes, and advising clients on structure, content and functionality
• Taking part in discovery workshops to understand the business, its audiences and goals
• Working closely with our copywriter so content and design develop together
• Presenting concepts and designs directly to clients, explaining your thinking and responding constructively to feedback
• Creating reusable components and flexible design systems that work effectively in development
• Collaborating closely with developers throughout the build, balancing creative ambition with what’s technically achievable and reviewing the finished site to make sure the design carries through
• Exploring interaction, animation and motion where they add something meaningful
• Developing digital work for existing clients as their businesses evolve, alongside occasional campaigns, email and wider studio projects
• Estimating your time and delivering work within agreed budgets
• Contributing ideas to Stride’s own brand and helping us keep improving how we approach digital work

AI and emerging technology

Digital design is changing quickly and we want someone who's excited by that.

You don’t need to be an expert in every new AI tool, but we'd like you to be curious and already exploring how AI and emerging technology can improve the creative process.

That might mean using AI to explore ideas and creative directions, create or manipulate imagery, prototype interactions, support UX thinking, speed up repetitive production tasks or experiment with completely new ways of doing things.

We’re interested in people who actively explore new tools, question established ways of working and bring ideas back to the team about how we could do things differently or better.

What we’re looking for

You absolutely don’t need to tick every box. We’re much more interested in finding a brilliant designer with the right creative instincts, digital understanding and appetite to learn than someone who happens to know every piece of software we currently use.

What matters most

• A strong portfolio of creative digital and website design work
• Excellent visual design skills, with a particularly strong eye for typography, layout, imagery and detail
• A good understanding of UX/UI principles and the ability to balance creativity with usability
• Experience thinking beyond individual pages to consider user journeys, website structure and the overall experience
• Experience contributing to client discovery workshops
• An understanding of responsive design and how websites behave across different screen sizes
• Enough understanding of web development to design realistically and collaborate effectively with developers
• Confidence communicating with clients and presenting your own work
• Experience working with WordPress and an understanding of how CMS-driven websites work
• The ability to explain and defend creative decisions while also responding constructively to feedback
• Good commercial awareness, including the ability to estimate your time and work within an agreed scope and budget
• The ability to manage your own workload and take ownership of your part of a project
• Experience using AI tools as part of your creative or production workflow, alongside a genuine curiosity about how AI and emerging technology can improve the way we work
• Experience working within a branding, design or creative agency

We’d love it if you also have

• Experience designing or building websites in Webflow
• Experience leading client discovery or UX workshops
• Motion, animation or interaction design skills
• Experience working across brand, print or other creative disciplines alongside digital

What this role isn’t

This isn’t a developer role, and we’re not expecting you to be responsible for everything technical that sits behind a website.

You’ll work alongside experienced developers and other specialists in areas including development, SEO and content.

Equally, this isn’t a role where you’ll be handed finished wireframes and asked to make them look nice. You’ll be involved in the thinking behind the work and will have a real influence on the creative direction and digital experience.

What we offer

• 27 days’ holiday plus bank holidays, increasing by one day for each year with Stride (up to 32 days)
• A proper Christmas break – the studio closes from Christmas Eve until the New Year
• Flexible/hybrid working – 3 days in the studio and 2 days remote
• Quarterly Stride Inspiration Days – a paid day out of the studio for creative inspiration
• A small, friendly team of talented people to work alongside
• A characterful city centre studio in the heart of Chester
• Cycle to Work scheme

About you

You’ll probably be someone who notices the little things.

We’re looking for someone who cares about whether a typeface feels right, whether a transition adds something, whether a page has enough space to breathe and whether an interaction feels intuitive.

But just as important is an interest in the bigger picture: who is using this website? What are they trying to achieve? What does the client actually need? Is there a better way of solving the problem?

We’d like you to be comfortable sharing ideas and having them challenged, to enjoy working collaboratively while also being happy to take ownership of your work, and to be able to move between ambitious creative thinking and the practical reality of delivering to a deadline and budget.

And we’d love you to be curious – interested in what’s happening in design, digital and technology, and keen to try new things.

About Stride

We’re an independent branding and digital studio based in Chester.

We work with ambitious organisations to create brands, websites and creative work that help them move forward. Our projects range from brand identities and campaigns to substantial website projects and long-term creative partnerships.

We’re a small team, which means everyone has a genuine influence on the work we produce and how the studio develops. You won’t be a small part of a large production line. You’ll work directly with our Creative Director, other designers, developers, writers and clients, and you’ll see projects through from the early conversations to the finished result.

We care about doing really good work, working with good people and building a studio we’re proud of.

Think you’d be a good fit?

We’d love to hear from you.