Senior Book Designer
Wonderbly, United Kingdom

A bit about Wonderbly

Wonderbly is a unique, award winning startup that designs, sells, prints and ships super high quality personalised books for children. Our books are designed to instil a sense of boundless self-belief in the children that read them. In the past five years we’ve sold over six million books and we want to sell hundreds of millions more so we can influence the lives of the next generation to be more curious, kind and courageous than any that has come before.

About the role

We’re looking for an experienced designer to join our Story Studio team and help us design our next generation of super high quality personalised books for people all over the world.

This is an important role and our first senior design hire for the Studio. You’ll be joining a team of multi-disciplinary creatives that work together to conceive, research, design and deliver 100% of the content of our unique personalised books.

So far we’ve mainly focused on children’s titles but we’re now beginning to move into more complex grown-up products. We’d love to find a designer to help us go on that journey. This role isn’t just to design our grown-up titles so you’ll also need to be passionate about designing for young people too, however, we think the person we’re looking for has probably worked within an editorial design team, or in a commissioning capacity in an editorial design team, that makes content for grownups at some point.

At Wonderbly we work closely together as an integrated team so you’ll need to be a great collaborator and communicator, able to bring folks along with your ideas and be confident in making the case for why you’ve made a design decision.

At the same time, we also pride ourselves on giving folks lots of autonomy to make their own decisions and plan their own time, so you’ll also need to be super organised and happy managing your own projects and priorities.

Above all though, the most important thing is that you’re a fantastic graphic designer that is looking for the next place to make a big impact. You love beautifully designed books, you love telling stories through the design of words and pictures on the page, and you’re happiest when you’ve got your head down crafting something wonderful that no one’s seen before.

We believe that Wonderbly’s ‘full stack publishing’ model creates a brilliant environment to be a designer. We design every part of the experience from the brand to the ads to the site to the actual books. This means we can make things that no one else can. If you’d like to help us, we’d love to hear from you.

Requirements

• Work with our Art Director and Illustrators to define design direction for whole books and series in partnership with other creative leaders.
• Take part in concept development work to create ideas for new books workshops and collaborative ideation is a key part of our process. Design isn’t just about delivery at Wonderbly.
• Design key elements of our more complex products covers and key spreads with important design elements along with taking responsibility for designing whole books.
• Support our whole team in improving design and production processes to make our work more fun and impactful.
• Mentor junior colleagues and help develop a culture of graphic design excellence at Wonderbly.

• 8+ years designing high-quality books for mass market audiences in a commercial environment
• Passionate about books and excited to keep learning more about design everyday
• Confident designer able to adapt to different editorial styles easily ideally, you have worked on many different lists in several different studios
• Experience across the whole lifecycle of book design from concepts through to final production you can comfortably work at different fidelities and are happy jumping from conversations and pencil to screens and tiny details in the same day
• Experience designing all aspects of books and editorial content covers, design systems, editorial content, illustrated content, typography selection
• Great presentation and communication skills you will need to bring many stakeholders along with your design direction so it’s vital you can explain your processes and thinking
• Nice to have experience working with international colleagues on non-English language editions
• Nice to have experience working in a digital first environment or with personalised content

Benefits

First and foremost we believe that doing inspiring, meaningful work with kind, curious and courageous colleagues is the main reason to join Wonderbly. However, we do also offer a range of other lovely benefits:

• We have a very flexible remote working policy - work in the way that suits you best. Most people are ch

Job Rewards and Benefits