Dovetail's mission is to enable the world to create better products and services through deep customer understanding. We empower 45,000+ people, from agencies to universities to Fortune 100 companies, to make sense of their customer research in one collaborative and powerful research platform.

With so many amazing projects coming up at Dovetail, we’re looking for designers to expand our Creative Studio.

The Creative Studio

Dovetail is a platform for teams to make better decisions by deeply understanding their customers.

You might not expect a startup of Dovetail’s size to have a Creative Studio, but we do things differently here. Design is at the core of everything we do. Our vision is for the Creative Studio to be the creative nucleus for all things at Dovetail, operating as an internal ‘agency’, made up of designers, illustrators, producers, writers, animators, engineers, thinkers, and makers.

Collaborating with folks all over the company, the studio executes on creative projects big, small, and first of their kind at Dovetail. The studio’s primary goal is to expand and evolve our house of brands to resonate with our growing audience, while still maintaining the character and weirdness that makes us unique. This ain’t no corporate gig – we celebrate getting kooky and pushing ourselves creatively.

The studio has the creative freedom and autonomy to explore different styles, mediums, techniques, and ultimately conceive and create distinctive and unforgettable work. Work that doesn't just look good, but makes you feel something too. Initiative always counts, and great ideas will be heard, even if they push the boundaries of what a traditional brand team would do.

Why do all of this in-house?

• The Creative Studio works closely with internal stakeholders, leading to more and better ideas, and a fast feedback loop.

• We move fast. Our products are always evolving, and as a result our brand needs to continuously evolve. We want a team who is able to build and maintain context overtime.

• Good design and visual communication is important to Dovetail, (we have a designer CEO, and design is represented in company leadership). We have a high bar, and we believe we can achieve excellence with our talented team in-house.

We’re inspired by the creative teams at software companies like Figma, Shopify, Intercom, Notion, and Dropbox.

• Contribute to the visual communication of our brands. You’ll work closely with the Creative Director and Creative Studio to define the creative direction of our brands within our house of brands. Including our products, multimedia playground, events, and parent company brand.

• Design our websites. Including dovetailapp.com, Method in Madness, our product help center, and other micro sites we plan to spin up. Our brands evolve quickly, and our websites do too. You’ll work closely with other designers and creative engineers to create engaging experiences. You’ll need to balance creativity and functionality.

• Help build and evolve our brand guidelines and design system. As the team grows we need to build and maintain guidelines and systems to help others contribute to our branding and websites. This includes logo usage, color, typography, the grid system, icons, navigation, form elements, banners, page layouts, page flows, widgets, and more.

• Work closely with our Creative Studio, and stakeholders across the business. We’re big on collaboration, and jamming on creative projects. You’ll be responsible for pulling folks together and facilitating ideas.

• Strong digital web design experience. You should be familiar with designing a website from the ground up including everything from establishing an IA to pixel-perfect mocks for both web and mobile, along with experimenting with new tooling and skills.

• Experience getting technical with developers. You’ve worked closely with developers to implement your designs, whether that’s using the Chrome inspector to provide feedback; exporting SVG files in a developer-friendly way; or thinking through a component architecture and translating a typography system to CSS.

• An extremely high attention to detail. One of our values is ‘if we do it, we nail it.’ You have a high-quality bar and strive to maintain an excellent, pixel-perfect level of detail and consistency across all brand and marketing activities.

• Practical design tool skills. You’re familiar with digital tools like Figma, Sketch, and Adobe Creative Cloud. For bonus points you know how to write some HTML and CSS, and for even more bonus points, you know how to write some JavaScript and/or React.

• Experience collaborating with others. You have a proven ability to communicate and influence creative decisions while welcoming cross-functional collaboration. You can smoothly manage incoming requests and feedback from the business and prioritize.

• Excellent communication. Skillful, concise communication so you can easily communicate visual concepts and rationalize your decisions. Be able to convey your opinions to the team, including founders (one of them is a designer!).

• Strong domain expertise is a plus. Ideally, you have hands-on experience working in small start-ups that are growing and transitioning to a more mature scale-up. Domain expertise in user research or design software is specifically a plus for this role.