Blueprint is tripling the size of our design team. Why?
In previous semesters, Blueprint only had a single design director. This year, we will have two design directors, plus 5 new project designers. Read on to learn more about what decisions led up to this change, and what our new designer role entails. If you are interested in joining us as a designer, learn more about how you can join here!
What design at Blueprint looked like before
In past semesters, Blueprint’s design roles were focused on the Design Director position. We’ve been blessed with incredibly strong Design Directors, and they have impacted our organization in countless ways — completely redesigning our brand and logo, producing brilliant social media banners, creating standout marketing material, educating our members on design principles, and more.
As alumni, our Directors have contributed their design gifts to exciting companies and organizations like Khan Academy, Samsara, Formswift, Segment, VMWare, and Facebook.
It’s safe to say that Blueprint wouldn’t be the Blueprint we know today, with its strong brand presence and playful visuals, without the efforts of our Design Directors. However, as we strove to achieve our mission of “making technology accessible and useful for those who create communities and promote public welfare”, we found that our Directors were stretched thin across their many responsibilities. Between designing brand assets, educating the organization on design principles, and designing for project teams, they had too many tasks to properly handle.
Last semester, in the spirit of our Always Innovate core value, we decided to split the Design Director position into two specialized roles: Director of Marketing and Director of Product. The marketing Director will create our brand assets: Facebook banners for our events, profile pictures, flyers, Instagram posts, etc. The product Director will focus on helping our project teams design beautiful products. In this way, we could more fully achieve our mission of making technology useful for our NPO partners through better-designed apps and websites. However, we believed we could take this expansion even further.
What design at Blueprint looks like now
Starting this semester, we will create a new designer position within Blueprint: the project designer! We will be recruiting a project designer for each project team, making a total of 5 new designers.
These designers will work with both the project lead and the product Design Director to conduct user research, create wireframes, and test user interfaces. In addition, they may be required to create project-specific design documentation like a style guide. With this change, we hope we can provide even more value to our nonprofit partners by dedicating a designer for every single NPO.
Who are we looking for?
We want to bring on folks who are committed — projects in Blueprint take at least 2 semesters to bring to fruition, and we expect our designers to be in it for the long-term.
We also value the willingness to learn. No matter what your skill level, if you’re enthusiastic to learn and build your skills, we have seasoned designers who can mentor you!
In addition, we value communication and collaboration. Designers will need to effectively communicate ideas and needs from their team. In addition, it is crucial to be able to work cohesively with developers who might not know everything about design.
Finally, and most importantly, we want to see an obvious interest in social impact and working on projects that better the world.
If you’re interested, apply!
Designer applications are open now and are due on 9/6/19. Head over to our website to learn more about our application process.
If our mission excites you, come join us! We are currently recruiting for developer, designer, and Blueprint External positions for Fall 2019. To learn more about us and our projects, visit our website and follow us on our Facebook page.
