Monday, August 6, 2018

YNAB Is Hiring a Humbly Confident Visual Designer

YNAB makes friendly, high quality software that changes lives through effective budgeting. We’ve got an ecosystem of apps, live classes, and stellar support. Now we need our next visual designer to bring the same attention to detail to our branding, marketing, and educational materials.

You come to the table with some experience under your belt. You know how to expand and maintain meticulous brand guidelines. You catch color mismatches that are mere shades off, you bristle at poor kerning, and you know that good design is in the details. You love to draw, and can create masterpieces with the pen tool. You also love to dream and get that our dream is to build a brand that is fun, smart, and approachable.

Requirements (these are real, actual requirements):

  • At least two years of experience working in marketing design.
  • Experience working within strict, existing brand guidelines.
  • Experience creating vector illustrations.
  • Experience doing time-sensitive production work.
  • Experience designing for responsive web.
  • Ability to work and communicate effectively in a remote environment.
  • Your home base must be located +/- two hours from North American Central Time.

A Bit About Us

We build the best budgeting software around, YNAB or You Need a Budget if you have a lot of extra time on your hands. For more than a decade, people have been using YNAB and then telling their friends what a difference it has made in their lives. (Google us, or read some of our reviews on the App Store, and you’ll see what we mean.) We love building something that has a huge positive impact on people’s lives.

We’re profitable, bootstrapped, and growing. YNAB started in 2004 and we haven’t taken any outside funding—we’re in it for the long haul.

We have one overarching requirement when it comes to joining our team: our Cultural Manifesto has to really click with you. If you’re nodding emphatically while reading it, you’ll probably fit right in, in which case, we can’t wait to hear from you!

First, let’s talk about life at YNAB and then we’ll go into detail about what we’re looking for.

Who you’d be working with:

Todd, our Chief Strategy Officer, obsesses about continuously improving our products and experiences our users have in them—and knows that process begins with design. He’ll have any conversation where he has the chance to learn something, and enjoys ideas for their own sake. He likes long gaps of silence and very loud music, running ultramarathons, and wants to disappear someday to make hand-crafted furniture.

Lindsey, our Chief Marketing Officer, is in charge of getting the word out about YNAB, and always finds a fun way to do that. Like our YNAB mix-tape, where-in she wrote and re-recorded budgeting-related lyrics to pop-songs. (We suggest reading the rest of this description while listening to that album.)

Lauren is our illustrator/designer. She is single-handedly responsible for almost all of the illustrations you see on our blog/Facebook/Instagram posts, and might be single-handedly responsible for all of the WoW achievement points mentioned on our About Page. We should also mention that she designed and illustrated that page. So yeah, her list of awesome just keeps going and going. Oh, and she writes fantasy novels. Seriously.

How You’ll Work at YNAB

We work really hard to make working at YNAB an amazing experience. We have a team full of truly exceptional people—the kind you’ll be excited to work with. Here’s how we operate:

Live Where You Want

We’re a distributed team, so you can live and work pretty much wherever you want (for this particular opening, there are some time-zone requirements). Proximity doesn’t influence productivity. Just make sure you have a reliable internet connection.

No Crazy Hours

We rarely work more than 40 hours per week. There have been a few occasions where things got a little crazy and people had to log some extra hours. But then they took some extra time off, so it all balances out. We work hard and smart but we’re in this for the long haul, no need to go crazy on the hours.

Take Vacation (Seriously)

We want you to take vacation. In fact, we have a minimum vacation policy of three weeks per year. Something closer to five is about right. Plus we take two extra weeks for a Holiday break. It’s important to get out and do something. We’ll look forward to seeing pictures of your vacation in our internal chat room, creatively named #office_wall.

The YNAB Meetup

We get the teams together once a year to catch up on spreadsheets and powerpoints in a Best Western conference room. Just kidding. So far, we’ve done Costa Rica, a gigantic cabin in the mountains, a beach house in the Outer Banks, and a ranch on Montana. We do really fun things, but the highlight is always just hanging out together and having a blast.

Up Your Game

We’re serious about helping you improve your craft. We budget for it (hey-o!). We have a monthly book budget, send people to conferences, give dedicated time away from work to learn something new… it’s really up to you and your manager. But we love to see our people growing.

International is Absolutely Okay

If you are Stateside, we’ll set you up as a W2 employee. If you’re international, you’ll be set up as a contractor. Employee or contractor, it’s all the same to us. You’re part of the team. We are spread all over the world, but for this particular position, we have a strong preference for candidates located +/- two hours from North American Central Time.

If You’re Stateside…

YNAB offers fantastic health, dental, and vision insurance, where we cover 100% of the premium for you and your family. (No need to check your vision, you read that right, 100%. Although if you did need to check your vision, NBD, we’ve got you covered!)

We also have a Traditional and Roth 401k option. YNAB contributes three percent whether you choose to throw any money in there or not. It vests immediately. (Are you a personal finance junkie like our founder Jesse? He set up YNAB’s 401k to have the lowest fee structure possible, where all plan costs are paid by YNAB, not your retirement nest egg. The investment funds available are fantastic, passively-managed, ultra low-cost index funds. You’re not a PF junkie? Why then, did you muddle through all of that awesomeness?)

Other Tidbits

  • Once you start, we DEMAND (in a friendly, ALL CAPS IS YELLING way) that you fill out your “Bucket List” spreadsheet with 50 items. (That’s harder than it sounds!)
  • The bucket list really helps in deciding what we should give you for your birthday and Christmas: No gift cards here. We tried that. Super boring.
  • We have a bonus plan based on profitability. You’ll be in on that from day one. YNAB wins, you win. That kind of thing.
  • We’re all adults. There’s no need to punch a clock, or ask for permission to take off early one afternoon to go see the doctor (health insurance premium 100% covered!). We look at what you’re accomplishing, not how long you sit (have you tried standing?) in front of a computer.
  • We want you firing on all cylinders so we’ll set you up with a shiny new computer and replace it every three years.
  • Did I mention we make a huge, positive difference in people’s lives? You may not think that matters much, but then a few months down the road you’ll realize it’s made your job really, really enjoyable. Don’t underestimate this one!

If this sounds like your ideal environment, read on because now I want to talk about you. You will play a big, big part in helping the YNAB brand come to life and reach wider audiences. I’ll only say that six more times.

Now, back to you, our new Visual Designer…

As a visual designer at YNAB, you’ll live on two teams. You’ll be a prized resource for our marketing team, churning out ads, landing pages, and illustrations while maintaining the YNAB brand. As a member of the design team you’ll work alongside both UI/UX designers and visual designers to consistently improve the quality of visual design across the YNAB ecosystem. You will be our boots on the ground, protecting our brand with your pixel-perfect attention to detail.

What Success Looks Like:

The marketing team marvels at your ability to think big and execute quickly on the smallest of tasks. You roll up your sleeves and deliver what’s needed, sometimes before the marketing team asks for it. Other designers can’t stop praising you for your museum-worthy artwork and strict approach to file management. You’ll probably make our CEO cry from time to time. Our campaigns are so beautiful he can barely look at them without bringing out a tissue. You also make us laugh. We like to laugh.

You take direction from multiple teams, and communicate freely. You understand that great communication and time management is critical to your success in a remote work environment. When you say it will be done, it will be done. Your teammates don’t even have to think about it.

You know a great designer loves the very smallest parts of the job. Some call it pixel pushing. Others call it production work. We call it craft. You love tweaking your designs in the browser and communicate easily with developers, including in HTML and CSS. Because that’s how it’s done.

Finally, the success of a designer at YNAB hinges upon the ability to approach design as holistic problem-solving for both creative and business goals. We work collaboratively here and you’ll listen to (devour, really) ideas, questions, and critiques from teammates with grace and patience. That said, you know your stuff and can eloquently and logically explain design decisions. You see this type of exchange as critical to the success of yourself and our company: it is through sharing ideas and being open to the brilliance of others that we arrive at the best solutions.

Bonus Points:

  • You already use and love YNAB.
  • You have experience with animation and/or know how to prepare artwork for rigging.

How to Apply

  • Apply here by 11:59pm on August 19th, 2018. It’s a firm deadline.
  • Attach a PDF of your cover letter. In your cover letter:
    • Introduce yourself and explain why this position is of interest to you, and why you would be a great fit.
    • We love a designer with a perspective. What’s yours? Feel free to touch on your beliefs on how design should be done, what it’s used for, or why it’s important.
  • If you have a prepared resume, attach it in PDF form. If you don’t have a resume because you aren’t even sure you’re looking to change jobs, that’s fine! An informal list of your work and education history are all we’re looking for.
  • Please include a portfolio that contains the following (if you are linking to an online portfolio, be sure to include the details below in your cover letter):
    • Examples of design work.
    • Your design process (wireframes, interviews, sketches).
    • Links to any live work.
    • Please state the role you played on each project and specify if certain artwork used in a design was not created by you.

The Portfolio:

Note: We greatly appreciate receiving work as a personal portfolio website, Dropbox folder, or PDF. Please do not send a Behance or Dribbble link unless you cannot do otherwise.

Include:

  • Examples of marketing campaign content, landing pages, ads, and other assets.
  • Examples of vector artwork you have created.
  • Any style guides, brand documentation, or UI kits you have produced.
  • Examples of responsive web design.
  • Please include personal work only if LABELED AS SUCH. We prize real work with real stories over perfect spec work.

P.S.  If you’re not interested in or available for this position, but know someone who is, we would really appreciate it if you passed this along!

The deadline for applications is 11:59PM on August 19th, 2018. Firm. It’s a real deadline, the kind you love.

The post YNAB Is Hiring a Humbly Confident Visual Designer appeared first on YNAB.

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