Careers
Web
designer.
You would own how a small business site looks and reads, from the first sketch to the version the client signs off, not screens handed on for somebody else to assemble.
01
The brief, which never changes
A stranger arrives on the page having never heard of the business, and decides almost immediately whether it is a real, established operation or something assembled at a weekend. They are not evaluating your composition. They are evaluating the business, and the page is the only evidence in front of them.
Everything else follows from that. The question is rarely whether a layout is attractive; it is whether it is credible. Those two come apart more often than designers like to admit, and where they do, credibility wins.
What the work involves
- Taking a business from a handful of photographs, a logo of uncertain quality and a page of copy nobody has edited, to a finished site.
- Deciding the order things appear in, which is most of the job: what sits at the top, what is cut, and which single sentence a reader meets before deciding whether to carry on.
- Setting type that stays legible on a phone screen in daylight rather than only on your own monitor.
- Choosing and cropping photographs, including judging when a photograph is worse than no photograph.
- Holding one house standard across many businesses at once, so that a client who happens to look at another of our sites does not find it better than their own.
What you would be judged on
Whether a stranger believes the business. Not whether a page won an argument internally, and not whether it resembles whatever is fashionable this year. We would look at the finished page rather than at the process that produced it.
The second measure is restraint. Most pages that fail do so by containing too much, and the clearest sign of somebody good at this is a list of things they took out and can justify taking out.
Who tends to be good at it
Someone who can read a page from a visitor’s point of view, explain why something should be removed even when a client likes it, and maintain a consistent standard across many different businesses.
What would make this the wrong job for you
If what you enjoy is one showpiece taken as far as it will go, this would frustrate you. The work is a standard applied repeatedly, and the reward is that a great many small businesses end up looking like they deserve to be taken seriously, not that one of them wins something.
Status
(Currently filled and not accepting applications at this time)