Product Designer

£27.5k - £35k per annum (based on experience), plus significant profit-share bonus scheme

BrightCarbon is a fast-growing business communications agency, based in Manchester, but with staff across the UK and in the USA. We help our clients with their presentations and eLearning, by taking their text-heavy content, and finding the right visuals and animations to tell their stories in ways that are compelling and persuasive.

We help our customers to launch their products, train their staff, and win big deals. Most of what we do is to create presentations and eLearning, but we also create motion graphics, infographics, and pretty much anything that uses our visual storytelling abilities. Check out the portfolio on our website for examples – we don’t use bullet points.

Over the last few years BrightCarbon has built a team creating products to help users get more from PowerPoint. The knowledge we possess about the presentation space as a company gives us a competitive edge in the world of presentation-centric digital products.

Our first product, BrightSlide®, is a free productivity tool for PowerPoint, used by tens of thousands of users in some of the world’s largest companies. Our second product, BrandIn, is targeted for enterprise customers and solves problems for brand management and content creation within PowerPoint. While an understanding of the presentation space and problems that enterprise organisations face is beneficial, it is not required. You’ll be able to build up knowledge on the enterprise landscape and PowerPoint through practice and training over time.

As a product designer you’ll be routinely working on user interface and user experience tasks — making sure new features are considered, tested, and adhere to established design systems before they are ready to be handed over to the development team. UI and UX are a strong component of this position, but you will also have opportunities to use your other skills.

This is an unusual role. For the right candidate, this could be a brilliant opportunity to do varied and rewarding work with a high degree of autonomy, and as part of an interesting and transparent company. As well as a contributory pension, we offer a generous profit-share bonus scheme; individual training, art, and inspiration budgets; a ‘work from anywhere’ scheme; we offset our carbon, donate plenty of work for charities, and give 1% of our revenue to environmental causes. Oh, and everybody gets their birthday and Christmas Eve off as extra paid leave. Each (regular) year we also send some of our team to design conferences in the USA and Europe – we know inspiration is important.

We are looking for a talented designer who thinks analytically, can use empathy to see problems from the perspective of users, has strong attention to detail, good knowledge of layout and typography, expresses their ideas clearly, works precisely, and who can make things look beautiful. We would expect you to have knowledge of UX design – from discovery, sketching, wireframing, prototyping, user flow design, and user testing. Experience in Figma is required; experience in PowerPoint or Excel might be helpful but aren’t essential. Some of our design team have degrees in graphic design or animation or even architecture – but others are self-taught; what we really care about is what you can do.

The right sort of person will be precise and accurate, enjoy working in depth, and be comfortable working with others. You probably have a creative side outside of work – be that in a quirky hobby or an unusual interest.

This job could be based out of our Manchester (Ancoats) or Bristol (Old Market) office, but for the right candidate we’ll be flexible on location. As long as the work gets done (well) – we don’t much care if it is done from home or the local coffee shop, as long as clients are happy. Not every great candidate lives – or wants to live – in a major city. We organise co-working space or office shares for our staff in a number of towns and cities.

BrightCarbon is an inclusive company and we welcome applicants of all backgrounds and identities. Candidates of any nationality; of black, white, Asian, or minority ethnic heritage; of any religious belief; of any working age; members of the LGBTQ+ community; those who are neurodivergent; and those with disabilities are encouraged to apply to join our increasingly diverse team. We are happy to support with any reasonable adjustments that are needed.