Canonical is hiring a visual designer (maternity cover) to join us at our London headquarters for 6 months. 

We are looking for someone who loves the web and has a great understanding of current design and technology trends.

Real content and information will be at the core of the designs you will produce. You know the ins and outs of typography, colour and layout, and care about usability, accessibility and web standards. You should have some experience as a designer in either agency, company or freelance environments.

What you will be doing

• You will be working closely with other visual and user experience designers, and front and back end developers, as part of the Web & Design Team. 

• You will work in an agile, iterative way - both independently and collaboratively - to develop solutions to key user problems. You will collaborate with project managers, squad leads, designers, developers and key stakeholders across the business to take products from concept to launch, and to promote those products on our websites.

• You will develop your design solutions in conjunction with lead visual designers and lead user experience designers.
• You will participate in briefings, week-long working sprints and workshops to understand the purpose and scope of the products we are creating
• On your day-to-day, depending on the timeline of the project, you might have to create quick sketches that are converted into prototypes, detailed mockups that go through several iterations, or prototypes of interactions (in InVision, HTML/CSS, etc.) 
• By working closely with user experience designers, you will have first hand experience of user research practices and techniques, and you will actively participate in workshops, sketching and brainstorming sessions
• You will also work closely with front end developers, refining, testing and iterating prototypes, reviewing builds and demos
• You will need to have a good knowledge of the Vanilla framework and observe defined patterns, but also contribute to its growth with new components or patterns as they develop.
• You will be reviewing and validating work with peers, stakeholders and users throughout the process - keeping constant and open communication with key team members
• You will communicate progress against defined goals using our tools and systems such as GitHub, to ensure distributed members of the team can see how work on a specific feature or issue is progressing.
• You will write blogs for our design site - We try as much as we can to share our experiences and knowledge within the team and to the community via blogs.

Skills we are looking for

• Ability to create great looking designs that work across a variety of form factors
• Aptitude for working at different levels of fidelity, taking an initial idea from sketches to final detailed artwork, and everything in between
• Keenness for exploring alternative options and iterating designs based on input and feedback from the team
• Ability to work within an existing brand, front end framework and pattern library
• Desire to work collaboratively with team members across different disciplines
• Ability to articulate clearly and effectively your design decisions to team members
• Ability to work in an agile way and manage your own workload to deliver designs to agreed timescales
• Proficiency in using your preferred design tools
• Basic understanding of HTML and CSS

What we offer

• Opportunity to help shape a company and a product with a strong influence in the open source community
• Opportunity to create work that will potentially be seen by millions of people
• A fantastic work environment within a team of friendly people with a broad range of skill sets, from UX and visual designers to researchers and copywriters
• A great location, right next to Tate Modern in Southbank, within walking distance to London Bridge, Waterloo, Borough Market and Southbank Centre
• Benefits package, including cycle to work scheme, pension scheme, childcare vouchers and health insurance