benWe are looking for a freelance visual designer to be our go-to contractor for the foreseeable future (Our previous designer worked with us for 8 years).
Inquirium is a three-person company celebrating our 18th anniversary designing and developing educational software and web applications for universities, museums, zoos, schools, and other non-profits.
We’re looking for a freelance visual designer with CSS and HTML skills who can help us design and build front-end web interfaces for several of our projects. This has the potential to be an extended gig.
Here’s who we’re looking for:
You have a great eye for clean, crisp, visual design. You enjoy iterative design and working in small teams. At the same time, you can work independently, stay on schedule, and don’t need a lot of hand holding to get the job done.
If you were working for us, here are some of the things you would have done last month:
- Help us create an HTML5/CSS3/React/Bootstrap mockup, based on pencil or wireframe sketches, of a web tool that helps students make sense of literature.
- Sit in on a weekly client call to discuss their UX and data visualization needs for a custom web app we’re building to allow clients to make sense of large research survey data sets.
- Sketch in real time during the call to convey and discuss design ideas.
- Prototype a pixel-perfect visual design for a revised company product site.
- Tweak the CSS for an existing web application to improve the user workflow.
- Install and run a local development environment for implementing CSS changes.
And here are some things you would do in the next month:
- Create a series of drawings/wireframes for a proposed skin to an alpha-stage custom web app that helps teachers visualize data on student achievement, engage in a round of internal feedback, then engage in a round of client feedback.
- Help refine an existing UX for another client web app; put in place a front-end development framework drawing on tools like React, Bootstrap, jQuery, SASS, and TypeScript.
- Brainstorm ideas for a revamp of our company website, do some preliminary sketches.
Required skills:
- A willingness and ability to be a jack of all trades, wear many hats, learn new skills, and do whatever needs to be done.
- Sketch/Photoshop/Illustrator and a sketchbook are your friends and constant companions.
- You should be familiar with the concepts of progressive enhancement, graceful degradation, and responsive design.
- You should be comfortable designing for mobile, touch/tablet, and desktop browsers and apps.
- You should be comfortable dropping into a terminal to install and set up local development environments, such as a node/npm server.
- You should be familiar with the capabilities and limitations of HTML5 and CSS3. Extra credit if you know React, SASS, jQuery, and Javascript. Double word score if you’ve worked with Django templates or another templating system.
- You should be familiar with version control software. We use git and hg.
- The job can be tailored to fit your strongest skill set, but a visual designer’s eye is an absolute must.
Experience is important. We’re looking for someone who can hit the ground running and make an immediate contribution to our active projects. This is not a good fit for someone looking for on-the-job training.
Another thing that’s important is your ability to work and communicate remotely with folks in different time zones. Our offices span three cities, and we rely heavily on online tools (Slack, Trello, Basecamp, Bitbucket) for talking, sharing design materials, and providing feedback. Our approach is to schedule a meeting, send an artifact ahead of time with specific feedback requests, meet to discuss, then work independently on follow-up action items.
If you’re interested in this job, convince us that you’re the one! Email jobs2019@inquirium.net
eric
matt