Junior Designer Role (Brand Designer with Motion skillset)

About KISS

KISS are looking for a Junior Designer with a passion for bringing brands to life.

KISS is a strategic branding studio led by Poonam Saini & Matt Kilb nestled along the riverside based in The Calls, Leeds. KISS’ purpose is to keep things simple. This means creative projects are led by the founders who cherry-pick an expert support team from the KISS collective on a project-by-project basis.

The studio mission follows 3 aspects. One is to help brand owners and senior leadership fall in love with their brands again or feel confident to bring a new brand to life. Two, help brands to engage with existing and fresh new audiences to future-proof their success. Three, transform the brands in preparation for the multiverse of branding.

Kiss is category agnostic with projects spanning a diverse range of markets from across food and drink, place-making, social enterprise, retail and hospitality with a broad range of brand-oriented services. All united by a burning desire to commercially succeed.

As a young company, we’re run by young minds with fresh ideas, transforming the brands we love and working in close creative partnerships with our clients.

The Role

This role’s primary purpose is to support the founders, Matt and Poonam, directly. Usually, this will be on a one-to-one basis to support the delivery of a wide range of client briefs, covering concept generation to development, brand world implementation across identity, packaging, digital and environment - there’s a chance to get stuck into every step and steer the output to effectively answer the brief and manifest the collective vision to the highest possible quality.

At this stage, we’re a small agency, so we’ll require you to step up and muck-in in every part of the creative process and across the business - guaranteeing a highly varied week.

KISS is highly strategic and will require applicants to have a keen desire to get fully immersed into a brief and throughout the project, to fully understand our clients and their business and brands.

Daily activities will involve concept generation, design development, creating brand identity systems, packaging design, marketing collateral, attending presentations and participating in workshops, plus file and artwork management.

What we’re looking for

While you won’t need to have years of experience in industry, post-grad or junior you’ll need to have a strong conceptual portfolio with a clear understanding of branding and the creative process. You will also need to have a good eye for design and the necessary software skills to jump straight in.

We need someone who strives to push their creativity and their skillset and represents this in their portfolio, with a variety of conceptual brand work and strategic thinking that stands out from the crowd. The right person will show a mix of ambition, willingness to learn and self-motivation, someone who continuously strives to build their skills and capabilities and be a core pillar within our growing business.

Ideally, we’re looking for a candidate who has shown an interest in bringing brands to life through motion and film and is also highly capable of graphic design.

We’re looking for someone with the right qualities:

• Strong Creative Thinker: Generate new ideas and novel solutions; think broadly; have a sharpness of thought; cut through and deliver creative solutions.
• Strong Brand Designer: Demonstrated understanding of brand and is able to create a brand concept and bring it to life.
• Interest In Motion: Demonstrated brand activation through animation and film
• Opportunist: Striving to deliver high-quality work, meaning that you will proactively look for ways to improve and achieve the best in themselves.
• Influencer: Have a grounded confidence; ask the right questions; demonstrate clarity of thought; adapt tone/approach to suit work needs; present a positive, honest and professional self-image.
• Maturity and Resilience: Has the ability to handle responsibility with grace and grit. Especially during high-pressure situations such as first-stage creative. Understand that setbacks happen and bounce back easily, not taking them personally, and be willing to progress concepts that may not have been generated by you originally.
• Challenger: Always looking to elevate execution and encourage new ways to problem solve; someone not afraid to test ideas out, get messy and think big; have a point of view with conviction in a brand.
• Cheerleader mindset: Has a positive attitude that is energising and uplifting in nature to both clients and the team. Respecting everyone’s position and valuing their input - it takes two to tango at KISS.
• Commitment: Back, with strong belief, the projects, the founders and KISS’ long-term ambition by jumping in and mucking in with the founders and having their back at all times.
• Well-rounded individual: Someone who’s an anorak at heart and has interests beyond work and the pub. Someone who naturally enriches themselves and others around them

What you’ll receive from KISS

• This is a permanent and full-time position with 35 working hours per week
• Hybrid working possible - set minimum days required in the studio per week.
• Studio by the river in the heart of Leeds, at The Calls
• Business opening times are 9:30 to 5:30
• Salary dependent on experience: £25,000 - £30,000
• Six-month probationary period
• 20 days holidays plus bank holidays.
• Additional discretionary Christmas break holidays (the studio is typically closed for 2 weeks over the Christmas period)
• Birthday day off
• One-hour lunch break, to be taken at any time
• Periodical performance assessment and review
• Work on a variety of exciting change-making projects
• Shadow and learn one-to-one directly with the founders