The Role of a Brand Designer

Canvs is looking for a Brand and Visual Designer to help us define our visual identity and lead creative efforts towards all communication touch points like our website, social media, white papers, decks and more. As a brand designer, you will be delivering stunning, high-impact creatives and creative experiences that accompany our communications and create a unique, lasting brand in India among agencies. Your work shall represent our visual identity as a company, the creative potential of our people and the intellectual depth of our craft. Above all, you will create a top of mind perception that anyone has of Canvs.

We are setting up a small team of brilliant creatives, writers and designers called the Creative Lab at Canvs. You shall be a part of it. The role of the creative lab will be to build shiny stuff that makes us look good.

What the Role Involves

Brand and Visual design requires a spectrum of skills that come together to build brilliant and astute communication pieces. Canvs is looking for brand designers who:

Build and maintain a visual identity for our company Canvs

Canvs is undertaking a brand redesign. We would want you to be a part of it and create the brand from scratch. We will most likely partner with an external group that shall liaison with you as a creative partner while they execute the whole exercise. Once done, this brand that was designed with ample contribution from you shall be developed and evolved further by you as we progress.

Formalize and maintain a visual identity for our product Cassini

Our product Cassini has a compact and general sense of visual identity to it. We will want you to do a short formalization exercise including creting templates for its social creatives, website creatives etc.

Create brand system that extends our identity to external parties

Both for Canvs and Cassini, we will want you to set up a design system, complete with guides, components and tempaltes so they can be easily used by other designers who subsequently join the team and external parties we involve on an ongoing basis.

Collaterals and Assets

Both for Canvs and Cassini you shall be involved in creating high quality creatives that work for Social, Emails, Websites, White Papers, Technical Documentation etc. Further you shall also be involved in building assets like our presentation decks, cover slides, formal communications as and when necessary.

Website related work for Canvs and Cassini

You will be required to work on landing pages and websites as well. Landing pages are one of the most important communication touchpoints for any modern company and being the team’s visual design expert, you shall play a critical role in the design of landing pages. These shall not be products but purely communication websites. These pages shall be used purely to portray visual brilliance and communicate campaigns brilliantly.

Develop Design Strategies

Design managers develop and implement successful design strategies, outlining how the design team will create deliverables and implement them for the project. Having a keen eye on the technology behind the product along with the business goals of the clientele is crucial.

Collaborate with Various Teams

Designers collaborate with other teams to ensure successful delivery of solutions. While primarily working alongside marketing, product, tech teams, you’ll also collaborate closely with other stakeholders such as business, marketing, legal/compliance, etc.

Present Design Ideas

Once design strategies have been developed, design managers present them to management and other relevant stakeholders. While presenting, design managers speak to specific numbers and expected outcomes on the basis of the business and technical requirements of the client, all the while advocating for the user.

Objective checklist

• 4+ years of experience working as a brand and visual designer
• Proficiency in using tools like Photoshop, Figma, Illustrator etc
• A body of work to show your skills. If you don’t have a portfolio set up, you can run us through your work over a call.
• Having good motion experience is a huge plus.
• Having exposure to our craft, user experience design, is a good bonus but won’t be necessary.

Skills That We're Looking For

• Impeccable craftsmanship- Your creative output shall be expected to embody a deep commitment to visual precision, meticulous attention to detail, and a stunning sense of awe inspiring artistry. The visual assets you create shall be reflective of who we are as creative professionals beyond our fundamental craft of building products. It shall visually represent the heart and soul we put into our craft and inspire creative confidence for us as a group of designers and engineers. Naturally, you shall be expected to have brilliant chops in typography, graphic design, color theory, composition, layouting, iconography, illustrations etc
• Conceptual and imaginative brilliance- Being able to come up with visual concepts that communicate a point or illustrate an idea is right up on the list of expectations along with craftsmanship. You are expected to visually conceptualise and compose creative representations of concepts and ideas at different levels of abstractions. This shall be the most common and repetitive initial step in any process of creative communication. A vivid imagination to paint abstract ideas and concepts into visual forms is a skill whose importance cannot be overstated for this role.
• Inventiveness and creativity- Being able to render concepts into visual representations shall require you to have strong skills in inventive thinking. While your combined experience in visual design shall seep into all your ideas, being able to create something fresh is a challenge that you shall face often.
• High standards and taste in graphic design- You will be the in house expert in Graphic and Brand design. Your shall be expected to know great work, inspire others to look at great work and be able to lift up the creative standards of the organisation as a whole with your knowledge and expertise. Your work shall set standards for us, our communications, our craft and most importantly, our identity. Your choices in design shall reflect our standards as a creative outfit and hence subsequently inspire confidence in potential clients.
• Tooling and resourcefulness in craft- As a brand designer, you’ll be expected to work with both Raster and Vector tools like Photoshop, Figma etc. Animation skills using products like After Effects, Rive etc shall be highly appreciated. Motion is an important part of visual design, and even if you do not animate, you shall be expected to conceptualize with motion as one of the degrees of freedom. While conceptualising you should know how to find good references to compose your ideas and explain them to your team.
• Deadline management –
• Persistence - When things don't go their way, you’ll be expected to find a way around it. The first solution is rarely ever the right solution, sometimes requirements evolve and sometimes roadblocks totally unknown (it happens). At times like these, being able to persist counts.

Compensation and Benefits

Compensation

We are offering an annual salary of INR 12-14 LPA (CTC) for this role.

Further, depending on how the firm does in a year and how you perform you receive a compensation bonus at the end of the year.

Benefits

1. Remote work: We are situated out of Powai, Mumbai but work remotely. You can work from anywhere in India as long as you are able to work without disruptions and are available all times during work hours. You are free to work from anywhere. However, we hold in-person meetings frequently for which your presence shall be required.
2. Leaves: We take flexibility seriously. While we do not penalize leaves as a principle and have a well documented leave policy that states how this works. This liberty of course comes with the responsibility of being judicious about your leaves lest it affects your work and the work of others in your team.
3. Health Insurance - Canvs provides medical insurance cover for you and your family (spouse and children). It comes with additional benefits like dental, appointments, mental health consultations etc.
4. Learning budget - Given the line of work we are in, learning is super important to us. So you can pick up courses and upskill yourself we provide a learning budget of INR 10k per year per person.
5. Tools for the trade - Remote work comes with different setup requirements. Anything you need to be able to do your best work, you’ll have it.

About Canvs & Our Culture

For more than 8 years, we've been proving that you don't need to be a big company to have a big impact. From running an entirely distributed, remote-first company years before it became the norm, to our unique blend of designers and design managers working together as an extension of our client's teams - we've always strived and mostly succeeded at punching above our weight.

Our culture, ever-evolving as it is, bases itself on a few simple principles. We get the job done but we don't play it safe. We've been working in a distributed fashion from Day 1 - so trust and transparency are crucial. Both within the team, and with our clients and partners. We celebrate our successes and own up to our mistakes - learning from them while fixing them - and potentially never repeating them. We believe in partnerships over one-nighters. We like our teammates and our clients to stick around, and we do what it takes to make that happen.

We believe in processes and are sticklers for them sometimes, but we also believe ultimately those processes are built around 'people'. Can't make it to a meeting? We've been Zooming into meetings before that became a verb. Something came up and you need to be away for a while - that's ok - we trust you enough to know you made sure someone else can hold the fort in the meantime, and we trust each other to know we'll do our best to hold the fort while you're gone. You go deal with what you need, keep us posted, and let us know how we can help.

We prioritize milestones over deadlines. Deadlines can be arbitrary. Milestones – when planned well – are a far better indicator of a project's overall health. We ensure quality by planning ahead and planning well.

Last but most importantly - we are an infinitely curious team - always learning, always exploring. We're rarely happy going as far as needed, only to stop there. We learn and we share constantly. As we get better at it internally, we're starting to share what we read and learn with the world. Go check out our newsletter and our editorial.

If you're good at what you do, are easy-going, and looking to learn and share knowledge with a curious team - we're pretty sure we'll get along well. Things you might need to know, we'll teach you if you promise to teach us the things you're really good at.

Come join us - we're just getting started.