Midweight Designer

Team Luke Powell and Jody Hudson-Powell Pentagram London

Midweight Designer Full time and permanent. London studio, three days in and two remote. £40,000 to £50,000 depending on experience.

The practice Luke and Jody have worked together for twenty years, ten of them at Pentagram. Before that it was the two of them, a desk, a laser printer and whoever they could pull in for a project. There was no point employing an animator when the next three jobs might not need animation.

The team is bigger now and it is built the same way. Most people here can animate, code, draw and design, and we still don't know which discipline the next job will want.

We're a design studio that happens to work on brands. Design leads. Strategy matters and we do plenty of it, but how a thing looks and moves and behaves is the argument rather than the packaging.

The work is deliberately unsorted. Isomorphic Labs, Cohere, Graphcore, Intrinsic, Oxford Ionics and Stereolabs sit next to Total War: Warhammer III, Channel 4, Cartier, four seasons of London Fashion Week, Frieze, MoN Takanawa: The Museum of Narratives, Bait and Happy Face Pizza. We don't sort them into categories. What we learn making an exhibition ends up in a robotics company, and it goes the other way just as often.

What connects them is simplification. We like a messy brief, where a company has lost coherence or never had it, and the instinct is to find the one system that makes everything else fall into place. Getting there usually means building something first. A tool, a typeface, a generative process. Ideas start analogue, in sketchbooks and arguments, and if you can't draw it or say it then it isn't ready. Then we make it, and the medium usually tells us what the idea actually was.

The role A midweight designer with a strong core in brand and typography, and growing fluency in motion.

Midweight here is about autonomy rather than years. It means you can take a brief from concept to something presentable without a director sitting next to you, and you know when to come back and ask.

You'd be working to Luke and Jody, alongside two Producers, five Designers, two Motion Designers and a Team Assistant.

The work - Building visual systems that adapt and behave - Typography and layout, at a high standard, across a lot of different sectors - Following one idea across brand narrative, graphic design, motion and interface to see where it holds - Working with the motion and 3D team, and often with creative coders - Pitches and new business, which come round more often than you might expect

The toolkit Weekly: Figma, Illustrator, Photoshop, InDesign, After Effects.

Also in use somewhere in the team: Cinema 4D, Blender, Glyphs, Houdini, Unity, Unreal, and a lot of front-end code.

We don't expect anyone to arrive with all of that. We hire based on how quickly someone picks up a tool, so if you've taught yourself something awkward recently, show us that.

On AI, we use it daily and always in a deliberate manner. We apply critical thinking and judgement to all our ways of working.