Brand Designer

Ascend•San Francisco, CA

23h•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, treating brand and product as interconnected disciplines. The ideal candidate will have a strong understanding of brand as infrastructure and expression, with the instincts of an art director. This position involves giving the brand fuller expression, evolving and codifying it across all mediums, owning the brand's architecture for products and acquired brands, and managing customer touchpoints like launches and onboarding. The role also includes experimenting with code and AI to build visual tools and generative systems, making the brand a living system, and proposing future brand directions.

Requirements

3+ years in brand or visual design, ideally in-house.
A portfolio demonstrating the ability to build or significantly evolve a brand system.
Art direction ability: capable of building a vision from references, imagery, texture, and type, with clear rationale.
Proficiency across digital, print, and environmental mediums, with some motion design skills.
Systems thinking: ability to identify when to build templates, patterns, or tools over one-off assets.
Ownership mentality: ability to run initiatives end-to-end, propose proactively, and defend decisions.
Clear communication skills, both written and spoken.
Ability to explain design rationale effectively.

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 for exploration, experimentation, and building internal tools.

Responsibilities

Learn Ascend's products, customers, and the flow of money in insurance.
Audit existing brand touchpoints and identify areas for improvement.
Become proficient in the design system and its integration of brand and product.
Take over recurring brand and marketing requests and deliver work.
Present an initial point of view on the brand's strengths, weaknesses, and investment priorities.
Take ownership of the visual system for Altitude 2027 and extend it to print materials.
Propose a direction for the brand's next chapter, aligning stakeholders.
Define the brand architecture for products, AI agents, events, and acquired brands.
Build templates and toolkits for teams to create on-brand work.
Deliver the Altitude 2027 event.
Codify the evolved brand into usable guidelines and components.
Develop visual tools and generative systems using code and AI.
Own the visual aspects of onboarding, lifecycle email, and product launches.
Track brand consistency and refine it as the company grows.