Design Lead / Senior Designer

Unthink Ltd; Dublin; Hybrid; EUR 65,000 - 90,000; Full time

Job summary

Unthink Ltd in Dublin is seeking a Design Lead / Senior Designer to join our studio and help shape the future of our work.

You will lead projects from concept to delivery, set creative direction, elevate typography and design systems, and collaborate with directors, designers, developers and managers across brand and digital experiences.

Qualifications

• Proven track record leading design projects from concept to delivery.
• Strong typography, layout and art direction skills.
• Experience shaping brand and digital design systems.
• Excellent visual judgement and collaborative mindset.

Responsibilities

• Lead projects from concept to delivery.
• Collaborate with directors, designers, developers and managers.
• Present work and explain design decisions clearly.
• Lead teams and mentor junior designers.
• Develop and maintain design systems across brand and digital.

Skills

Visual design

Typography

Art direction

Design systems

Leadership

Stakeholder management

Systems thinking

Communication

Collaboration

Job description

We’re growing and we need an exceptional designer to help shape the future of our studio. Think you can be the next Unthinker?

About the role

We are looking for a Design Lead / Senior Designer to join our Dublin Studio. This person will work closely with the entire Unthink team – directors, designers, developers and managers. We are looking for someone who is creative, collaborative and can lead projects from beginning to end.

We are looking for someone with strong creative judgement, excellent visual design ability and a clear understanding of how design systems work across brand and digital. Someone who wants to help lead the creative direction of the studio, take ownership of projects and raise the quality of the work around them.

You should have strong typography, layout and art direction skills, along with a confident understanding of web and digital design. You do not need to be a developer, but you should understand how websites are structured, how design translates into build, and how to think systematically across responsive digital experiences.

You should be comfortable working with ambiguity and evolving briefs. Many of our projects involve multiple stakeholders, complex content, public audiences or organisations in moments of change. We need someone who can uncover what matters, make sense of that complexity and turn it into clear, useful and distinctive design work.

Your weeks will include ideating, strategising, designing, liaising with clients, delivering stellar presentations, difficult and brilliant conversations, leading teams, teaching juniors, art working, emailing and explaining. We’re a ‘work together’ studio where no role is too big and no job is too small. We need an exceptional designer, a generous collaborator, an honest talker and someone who is generally, sound.

About us

We are a creative branding and digital design studio that values creativity, relationships and purpose-driven projects. We work with clients across all sectors but particularly within arts & culture, education and hospitality.

We recently became a certified B-Corp, but we have shared its values for a long, long time. We believe that businesses have a responsibility to positively impact the people they work with, the communities they’re part of and the planet they live on.

Studio culture and having a positive work-life balance is important to us. We are predominantly an in-person studio as we believe our best work comes from collaboration but we are open to flexible working arrangements. We are currently in our second year of offering a 9-Day fortnight which means you’ll have (almost) every second Friday off and you’ll never have to work more than 9 weekdays in a row.

About you

Enough about us, this is really all about you. If you are…

• An excellent visual designer with strong taste, judgement and attention to detail.
• A systems thinker who can work across identity, digital, campaigns and content.
• A confident communicator who can present work and explain design decisions clearly.
• A collaborative creative who enjoys working with others.
• A thoughtful critic who can raise standards constructively.
• Calm, curious and emotionally intelligent.
• Proactive and self-directing, with the ability to spot what needs to happen next.
• Able to exercise good judgement and balance creativity with pragmatism.
• Comfortable giving and receiving feedback.
• Commercially aware, with an understanding of scope, time and project constraints.
• Invested in the quality of the work and the reputation of the studio.
• A professional with a minimum of 7 years experience.

What matters most is that you can show evidence of leading meaningful design work and contributing beyond execution alone. We want to work with someone who gets excited by making thoughtful work with good people, someone who wants to enrich every project they work on.