Digital Designer

About the role

We’re looking for a digital designer to add to our small creative team. Someone with strong ideas, great design instincts and a real understanding of how to bring brands to life online.

This is a creative-led role for someone who wants to design work that's both beautiful and genuinely useful.

You'll take a leading role in the websites and digital experiences we create, working from the very beginning of a project to help understand the brief, the business and its audiences. You'll help shape site structures and user journeys before bringing everything together through thoughtful, brand-led UX and UI design.

We want someone who can take a brand and think about how it should come to life digitally - through typography, imagery, layout, interaction, movement and ideas.

You'll work closely with our Creative Director, designers, developers, SEO specialist, copywriter and clients to take projects from initial thinking through design and into development and launch.

We're a small studio, so there will always be variety. Digital will be your specialism, but you'll also have opportunities to contribute creatively across a wide range of studio projects.

What you'll be doing

• Designing distinctive, brand-led websites and digital experiences in Figma, from early concepts through to responsive UX and UI
• Exploring how brands come to life online through typography, imagery, layout, interaction and movement
• Planning user journeys, sitemaps, information architecture and wireframes, and advising clients on structure, content and functionality
• Taking part in discovery workshops to understand the business, its audiences and goals
• Working closely with our copywriter so content and design develop together
• Presenting concepts and designs directly to clients, explaining your thinking and responding constructively to feedback
• Creating reusable components and flexible design systems that work effectively in development
• Collaborating closely with developers throughout the build, balancing creative ambition with what’s technically achievable and reviewing the finished site to make sure the design carries through
• Exploring interaction, animation and motion where they add something meaningful
• Developing digital work for existing clients as their businesses evolve, alongside occasional campaigns, email and wider studio projects
• Estimating your time and delivering work within agreed budgets
• Contributing ideas to Stride’s own brand and helping us keep improving how we approach digital work

AI and emerging technology

Digital design is changing quickly and we want someone who's excited by that.

You don't need to be an expert in every new AI tool, but we'd like you to be curious and already exploring how AI and emerging technology can improve the creative process.

That might mean using AI to explore ideas and creative directions, create or manipulate imagery, prototype interactions, support UX thinking, speed up repetitive production tasks or experiment with completely new ways of doing things.

We're interested in people who actively explore new tools, question established ways of working and bring ideas back to the team about how we could do things differently or better.

What we're looking for

Essential

• A strong portfolio of creative digital and website design work
• Excellent visual design skills, with a particularly strong eye for typography, layout, imagery and detail
• Excellent Figma skills
• A good understanding of UX/UI principles and the ability to balance creativity with usability
• Experience thinking beyond individual pages to consider user journeys, website structure and the overall experience
• Experience contributing to client discovery workshops
• An understanding of responsive design and how websites behave across different screen sizes
• Enough understanding of web development to design realistically and collaborate effectively with developers
• Confidence communicating with clients and presenting your own work
• Experience working with WordPress and an understanding of how CMS-driven websites work
• The ability to explain and defend creative decisions while also responding constructively to feedback
• Good commercial awareness, including the ability to estimate your time and work within an agreed scope and budget
• The ability to manage your own workload and take ownership of your part of a project
• Experience using AI tools as part of your creative or production workflow, alongside a genuine curiosity about how AI and emerging technology can improve the way we work
• Experience working within a branding, design or creative agency

We'd love it if you also have

• Experience designing or building websites in Webflow
• Experience leading client discovery or UX workshops
• Motion, animation or interaction design skills
• Experience designing email campaigns
• Experience working across brand, print or other creative disciplines alongside digital

You absolutely don't need to tick every box. We're much more interested in finding a brilliant designer with the right creative instincts, digital understanding and appetite to learn than someone who happens to know every piece of software we currently use.

What this role isn't

This isn't a developer role, and we're not expecting you to be responsible for everything technical that sits behind a website.

You'll work alongside experienced developers and other specialists in areas including development, SEO and content.

Equally, this isn't a role where you'll be handed finished wireframes and asked to make them look nice. You'll be involved in the thinking behind the work and will have a real influence on the creative direction and digital experience.

About you

You'll probably be someone who notices the little things.

You care about whether a typeface feels right, whether a transition adds something, whether a page has enough space to breathe and whether an interaction feels intuitive.

But you're equally interested in the bigger picture: who is using this website? What are they trying to achieve? What does the client actually need? Is there a better way of solving the problem?

You're comfortable sharing ideas and having them challenged. You enjoy working collaboratively but don't need someone looking over your shoulder. You can move between ambitious creative thinking and the practical reality of delivering work to a deadline and budget.

And you're curious. You're interested in what's happening in design, digital and technology and naturally want to try new things.