Lead Editorial Designer

Works in Progress is looking for an experienced editorial designer to work with us on our print magazine. We publish long-form pieces on scientific and technological progress, history, economic growth, beauty, urbanism, global health, and energy. Your work will make these ideas look clear, elegant, attractive and memorable in print. We want our magazine to be remarkable for its beauty.

Your role will be to lead editorial layout alongside our art director. You will be expected to:

• Plan pagination, design and set page layouts, and place artwork.
• Typeset the magazine’s articles and other written features.
• Create custom illustrations of varied complexity for each article.
• Keep the design of the print magazine fresh across covers, section openers, charts, and promos.
• Oversee external designers, including our contractor producing dataviz.
• Prepare and upload print-ready files on time.

We expect you to meet the following minimum requirements for the role:

• Based in London and willing to work in person at our offices in Liverpool Street.
• Five or more years of experience in magazine layout.
• Strong skills in and love for typography.
• Deep knowledge of the full Adobe suite for print (InDesign, Photoshop, and Illustrator).

You are our dream candidate for this role if you have strong experience in illustration as well as typography, which you bring to the ornamentation you create for the magazine. You love snooping through archives and museums for interesting visuals you can adapt for the magazine. You appreciate the refinement brought about by minimalist movements in design, but are an ornament-loving maximalist at heart. Most of all, you are a type nerd.

Our website is simple and functional, but don't be mislead - our print magazine is lush and complex. These are some things we love:

• The interactions between type and illustration in Ver Sacrum
• Bjork posters by M+M Paris
• Ironwork screens and Persian carpets in the Victoria and Albert Museum
• The Public Domain Reveiw
• Gloriously attenuated ornaments in Jugend
• That when you bend Sagmeister and Walsh's book Beauty, the fore-edge spells out 'beauty=function'

This is a contractor role, and we are initially offering a one-year contract for the production of six issues. We hope to extend that contract if all goes well. We will offer £60,000–80,000 depending on experience.