The Opportunity:
My client is seeking an exceptional Senior Brand Designer to shape the visual identity and storytelling of a new nonprofit public benefit organization — its Research Institute. This is a founding creative role: the Institute is new, but it comes from a legacy brand, and has a lot of older components, legacy branding and redundant components that need finetuning and bringing into a new era.
This is brand storytelling, not the performance marketing funnel — integrated brand campaigns, digital storytelling, event activations, and philanthropy/partnership materials that introduce the Institute to consumers, scientists, philanthropic supporters, the media, and more.
It's a B2C brand at heart: the end user is the everyday consumer, not a scientist. The strongest candidates will have genuine experience designing for consumer audiences.
Who They Are:
A nonprofit medical research organization that enables people everywhere to access their genetic information, learn about themselves, and be able to understand potential hereditary issue within their genes — They also have the ambition to be the most significant contributor to scientific advancement, uniting people around improving health and understanding DNA.
What You'll Do:
- Digital Brand Storytelling — Design web pages, microsites, social content, editorial features, and data visualization that translates complex science into something a consumer audience wants to engage with.
- Event Activations — Own the visual identity for key events, conferences, and donor moments: environmental graphics, stage design direction, slides, attendee materials, swag, and photo/video assets.
- Partnership Pitches & Integrations — Design and art-direct partnership pitch decks and co-branded campaign assets.
- Creative Direction & Agency Management — Brief, hire, and steer external design/video agencies and freelancers; set the creative bar and protect the Institute's voice.
- Visual Identity & System — Evolve the Institute's identity (typography, color, image direction, motion) and the systems/templates that let it scale consistently across teams.
- Cross-Functional Collaboration — Partner with UX, Tech, Marketing, Digital, scientists, writers, communications, philanthropy, and partnership leads to shape the story before designing the assets.
What You'll Bring:
- Experience — 6+ years of brand, digital or marketing design experience, including 2+ years as a senior IC, design lead, or ACD for a B2C company where you have seen how your design choices affected the organization and the end user.
- Portfolio — A strong portfolio demonstrating exceptional graphic design fundamentals — typography, layout, color, image direction, editorial sensibility — across identity, campaign, and digital work. Required for consideration.
- B2C Experience — Genuine experience designing for consumer audiences, not just B2B or internal marketing.
- Storytelling Instinct — Comfortable turning abstract or technical/scientific ideas into images, systems, and narratives that land with different audiences.
- Branding / Design auditing and finetuning — Comfortable with auditing and influencing the existing brand guidelines and design components to ensure that the design is inline with user requirements and the organizations goals.
- Technical Mastery and content management — Fluency in Figma and Adobe Creative Suite (Illustrator, Photoshop, InDesign); strong aptitude with AI-assisted design tools; comfortable directing video editors.
- Hybrid Availability — Able to work in the Palo Alto office 3 days per week, in person with the Brand Team.