We need an expert web designer with excellent HTML and CSS skills to join our team full-time. The right individual will have experience designing user interfaces for web applications, will have good typographical skills, a strong foundation in design principles, and will be as passionate about great design, semantic markup, and web standards as we are about our Ruby code.
We don’t believe that usability or user experience should be the domain of any one person or some mystical art. The same can be said for HTML and CSS. That’s why the designers at thoughtbot work up and down the full stack of what it means to be a designer: Interaction, usability, user experience, graphic design, HTML, and CSS.
That may sound like a lot for one person, but that’s why we build the smallest thing possible and iterate from there.
The job of the designer is ultimately to build a product. The designer must direct his or her efforts towards defining what the product is and how it works. It’s only after these questions are answered that how it looks becomes the issue of first importance.
Within the context of a team, the designer has prime responsibility for making sure the product being built has a great user experience. Often this means communicating with the client, developers, and any other stakeholders to address concerns and then find solutions.
While we stress the importance of functionality and usability, we still expect a high level of visual refinement to our products. An excellent understanding and use of grids, typography, color, etc. are essential for building quality, compelling products.
If all this is interesting to you, you might be interested in reading more about our design philosophy in our playbook.
The competitive salary for the Designer position will depend on experience, and includes unlimited time off, medical benefits, 401k with matching and other excellent benefits, including relocation if needed.
We limit client work to four days/week and provide unlimited time off. Creating well-designed, well-written software requires a well-rested mind and body. We do not want to burn out or inflict repetitive stress injuries. Fewer hours means we won't hit arbitrary or unrealistic deadlines. [Read more]
For the kinds of projects and clients we work with, sales people and project managers get in the way. The people who sell our work also write significant amounts of code, usually more than 30 hours/week. They don't sell projects they wouldn't want to work on themselves.
Our fundamental expectation is delivering excellent work on client projects. Exceeding expectations requires improving thoughtbot and your teammates by contributing to open source projects, mentoring apprentices, sharing lessons learned on the blog, and making things we haven't dreamed up yet.
The company is split up into small teams. Our ideal team is one designer, two developers, and an advisor. Each team focuses on only one client project at time. The remainder of everyone's time is managed by each individual. [Read more]
We are actively diversifying our revenue. Consulting is our bread and butter. We love our clients. Their needs have grown to team building and education services, which we offer to anyone around the world.
In order to spread knowledge of best practices, we rotate people among projects about every two months. We have to leave our projects in excellent shape at all times so new team members can get up to speed quickly.