Stamen is looking for a designer
Update, May 8, 2009: This position has been filled. We are, however, always looking for interesting collaborators, so feel free to mail us about working with us, and if things change (they often do), we'll be sure to get in touch. Sometimes it can just take a while. Thanks.
We found our designer/coder and flew him over from England. Now our busy San Francisco design and technology studio is looking for an outstanding visual designer.
About You:
This is a hands-on web design position. You'll be working with a team of designer/engineers who will be looking to you to help make their ideas sing. You should be the kind of person who can rework and iterate an idea until it's perfect.
We want to see that you are comfortable making connections between visual presentation, information organization, and enabling technologies. You'll need to know and be willing and very able to learn a wide variety of web-related applications and languages, and find joy in moving seamlessly between them: css, actionscript, photoshop, illustrator, flash, etc. The word "etc." is a key part of our work. Digital material is our clay; it's important to us how it flows.
We're less concerned with how long you've worked than with how good you are. You will need to have been paid to do good work; the skill that comes from delivering work for money can't be learned in any other way. At Stamen, you'll be asked to provide everything from initial sketches to finished product, and lots of it.
About Stamen:
Stamen is lucky; we get to work on a wide variety of projects. We are committed to maintaining a constant state of learning, both about our tools and about the world. We want to continue to work with people who know a lot—and are excited to learn even more.
Stamen works with flows of real data: online user interest, GPS positions of taxis, shipping container traffic flows, 50,000 people nationwide gathered online to express their political views. We've often found it easier to build something than to comp it in Photoshop. Our design challenges are less about font choice (Helvetica is the font choice) and more about clarity, movement, and slickness. We seek to delight with our work.
This is an opportunity to work with a small, seasoned and excitable group that delight in blurring the difference between design and technology. Our work and play is leading us in a direction that we don't entirely have planned out, but which ranges from visualizing the web as it happens on Digg to mapping live taxi data in San Francisco to collecting the most stunning photos on Flickr.
We can promise that the work will be interesting—what we want is the best that you can do, and more besides.
And So:
Qualified applicants will have an online portfolio of work (please, no attachments) and demonstrated code and design abilities; we are primarily looking for a visual designer but if you can't code, there's no flow. On the other hand, Stamen's work is not about whanging out a week's worth of Javascript in one all-nighter, but more about stepping back from that and figuring out the grain of the materials. We want someone who is a designer first and foremost, a coder a distant second, and who's interested in where these areas interleave.
If this sounds like you, please contact us at info (at) stamen.com; no phone calls please.