Visual Design Apprentice

Liminal; Boston (MA); On-site; USD 70,000 - 110,000; Full time

Job summary

Liminal is a Founders' Studio that co-builds with repeat founders, offering build expertise, capital, and access from founding to Series B. We seek a designer who blends exceptional visual craft with UX sensibilities to shape identity, interfaces, decks, and assets for ventures.

You will translate brand strategy into visual systems, design high-fidelity interfaces, and develop scalable design language for a portfolio of startups.

Qualifications

• Portfolio demonstrating strong visual craft across brand and digital surfaces.
• Excellent typography, color theory, composition, and layout.
• Proficiency in Figma and Adobe Creative Suite.
• Ability to work with ambiguity on founder-led projects.
• Independent thinker with strong reasoning and debate skills.

Responsibilities

• Visual identity and brand systems. Translate brand strategy into complete visual identities: typography, color, layout grids, iconography, the overall look and feel that makes a venture cohesive across every touchpoint.
• Product and digital surfaces. Design clean, visually engaging UI for early-stage products: landing pages, dashboards, onboarding flows, marketing pages. You own the high-fidelity output and work directly with engineering so what ships looks like what you designed.
• Brand assets at scale. Decks, social content, one-pagers, investor materials, event collateral. Often the first thing the outside world sees. They need to be flawless.
• Design system stewardship. Build and maintain coherent design languages that hold up as the venture grows, so the hundredth asset looks as considered as the first.

Skills

Visual design

Typography

Brand identity

Layout

Color theory

Figma

Adobe Creative Suite

UX instincts

Ambiguity tolerance

Independent thinking

Tools

Figma

Adobe Creative Suite

Job description

What Liminal Is

A Founders' Studio. We co-build with repeat founders, many of them unicorn founders, providing build expertise, capital, and unfair access from founding to Series B. We call ourselves a Founders' Studio because "venture studio" undersells what we do and oversells what most of them deliver.

What This Role Actually Is

Dirty secret in design hiring: the Venn of great visual and great UX designers barely overlaps. We hire for the visual circle. Emphatically.

You build the visual layer for a venture: identity, interfaces, decks, assets. You turn positioning into something a founder looks at and says "that's us." You sweat what others don't see. Optical alignment. The weight of whitespace. Why one shade of blue reads "trustworthy fintech" and the one three hex values over reads "dental office."

The Work

• Visual identity and brand systems. Translate brand strategy into complete visual identities: typography, color, layout grids, iconography, the overall look and feel that makes a venture cohesive across every touchpoint.
• Product and digital surfaces. Design clean, visually engaging UI for early-stage products: landing pages, dashboards, onboarding flows, marketing pages. You own the high-fidelity output and work directly with engineering so what ships looks like what you designed.
• Brand assets at scale. Decks, social content, one-pagers, investor materials, event collateral. Often the first thing the outside world sees. They need to be flawless.
• Design system stewardship. Build and maintain coherent design languages that hold up as the venture grows, so the hundredth asset looks as considered as the first.

Who You Are

• Exceptional visual craft. A portfolio that makes us lean in. Strong command of typography, color theory, composition, and layout across brand and digital surfaces. You know the difference between beautiful and merely pretty. You can explain why, in terms that aren't just vibes.
• Exquisite taste. Omnivorous and opinionated. You have feelings about restaurant menus, movie title sequences, transit signage, and the packaging on your toothpaste. Your taste is informed by what you've consumed across design, art, architecture, fashion, and culture. Not just what Dribbble served you last week.
• Tool fluency. Figma and Adobe Creative Suite are second nature. You work fast, iterate without preciousness, and produce high-fidelity output that doesn't need a translator between you and engineering.
• Comfort with ambiguity. No brand guides. No existing design systems. No "make it like the last one." A founder, a blank page, and a company that needs to look like it was inevitable. That should thrill you.
• Contrarian streak. Independent thinker. Arguments from first principles. Unafraid of unpopular positions. You believe the best ideas survive open debate. You know how to disagree and commit.

Unicorn Points If

You also have real UX instincts: information architecture, user flows, wireframing, usability audits. Bonus, not the job. The job is aesthetic sense and visual craft. That's the bar. Designers genuinely excellent at both visual and experience design are rare. If you're one, say so. We'll notice.

Twelve months. Meaningful stipend. Embedded in a core projects alongside experienced builders. Not fetching coffee, that's the leaders' job. Not mocking up hypothetical case studies for a portfolio review. If you've got the craft and the taste and you're looking for the place where both actually matter, this is the door.