Brand Designer

Ascend•San Francisco, CA

1d•$100,000 - $150,000•Onsite

About The Position

Ascend is seeking a Brand Designer to own the company's brand expression, evolution, and architecture as it grows. This role reports to the head of design and collaborates closely with product and marketing teams. The ideal candidate will treat brand as infrastructure as much as expression, with the instincts of an art director. The position involves giving the brand fuller expression, evolving and codifying it across all mediums, owning the brand's architecture for products and acquired brands, managing customer touchpoints, experimenting with code and AI to create visual tools, and ensuring the brand remains a living, responsive system. The role requires proposing future brand directions and pushing creative boundaries.

Requirements

3+ years in brand or visual design, ideally in-house.
A portfolio demonstrating the ability to build or meaningfully evolve a brand system, not just execute existing guidelines.
Art direction ability: capacity to build a vision from references, imagery, texture, and type, with clear underlying thinking.
Proficiency across multiple mediums: digital, print, environmental, and motion design.
Systems thinking: ability to identify opportunities for templates, patterns, or tools over one-off assets.
Strong sense of ownership: ability to run initiatives end-to-end, proactively propose solutions, and defend or adapt decisions based on strong arguments.
Clear communication skills, both written and spoken, with the ability to articulate design rationale.

Nice To Haves

Experience with B2B, fintech, or technical products.
Motion design or animation skills.
Comfort working with code or a headless CMS.
AI fluency, including using AI for exploration, experimentation, and building internal tools.

Responsibilities

Learn Ascend's products, customers, and how money moves through insurance.
Audit brand presence across all touchpoints (product, web, email, decks, events, print) and identify areas of strength, weakness, or inconsistency.
Become proficient in the design system and its integration with brand and product.
Take over recurring brand and marketing requests and deliver tangible work.
Present an initial point of view on the brand's current state, missing elements, and investment priorities.
Manage Altitude 2027's visual system, extending it to print materials, signage, wayfinding, programs, merchandise, and stage/screen elements.
Propose a future direction for the brand, including references, texture, imagery, and typography, and gain alignment from design, marketing, and leadership.
Define the brand architecture, clarifying the relationship between products, AI agents, events, and acquired brands.
Develop templates and toolkits to enable teams to produce on-brand work independently.
Deliver the Altitude 2027 event in May.
Codify the evolved brand into a usable system of guidelines and components for all mediums.
Utilize code and AI to create visual tools and generative systems that expand the brand's visual possibilities.
Oversee the visual aspects of onboarding, lifecycle emails, and product launches in collaboration with product design.
Monitor brand consistency and evolution, making refinements as the company grows.