Motion Designer

We're looking for a talented Motion Designer to join our Brighton-based team. We’re seeking someone with a great eye for design and an exceptional flare for animation. Most importantly, we want to find someone with a willingness to learn and develop their craft. Someone who will bring their ideas and passion to help us develop shareworthy projects that delight and inspire.

In return, we’re offering a great working environment and a supportive, development-focused culture with an emphasis on work-life balance. We’re a studio of continuous improvement and this extends to the ways we engage and reward the team. Please check out our list of perks below.

About us

Buff is a motion design studio making animation for brilliant brands, agencies and nonprofits. We’re a certified Great Place to Work and working towards our B Corp certification. We work with a variety of clients, from world-renowned tech companies to newly launched brands and everything in between. Producing all kinds of motion projects like brand packages, promos and advertising campaigns.

Read more about the studio on our site and watch our reel to see if it’s the type of work you’d like to make. If we feel like a good fit, then we’d love to hear from you.

Please note that all of our roles are majority studio-based. Having in-person interaction is something we value and believe positively impacts how our team collaborates effectively. Our current policy allows working from home up to 2 days per week to provide variety and support wellbeing. We will not be accepting applications for fully remote workers.

About the role

You’ll be part of the creative team, reporting to our Creative Director. Working alongside our other motion designers, designers, and illustrators, you’ll have the opportunity to work on a variety of creative projects. Sometimes from start to finish as the lead motion designer and sometimes in collaboration with other designers on larger or quick turnaround projects.

Your day-to-day responsibilities will include:

• Concepting and R&D for new projects
• Developing visual ideas for scripts and storyboarding
• Creating and preparing assets
• Animating
• Giving creative feedback
• Keeping up to date with industry trends, tools and techniques
• Doing all you can to develop your motion skills
• Suggesting improvements to studio operations and ways of working

To find out more about what life for our motion designers looks like then check out the team’s blog posts: Marius, Mark, Lily & Abraham.

Role requirements:

• Experience using After Effects, Illustrator and Photoshop
• Solid understanding of design and animation principles demonstrated within a reel
• Clear communication skills with excellent written & spoken English
• Eligible to work in the UK and able to work from our studio in Brighton

Nice-to-haves:

• Experience working in a professional creative studio
• Understanding of character rigging and animation
• Knowledge of a 3D application (ideally Cinema 4D)

A big part of being successful in the role is continually developing your skills. We have a strong focus on personal and professional development with quarterly check-ins on your goals. There are opportunities for on-the-job learning whilst working on live projects, as well as support and regular feedback from senior team members. We also have monthly development days where we step away from client work, and weekly creative team skillshare sessions to share and learn new things.

What we offer

We always want our team to feel heard, valued and rewarded. Here are some of the ways we do that:

• 25 days holiday (plus bank holidays) and 1 day for every year of service
• Time off between Christmas and New Year when the studio closes
• Option to work from home 2 days per week
• Private medical insurance
• Profit share end-of-year bonus and a festive December bonus
• Workplace pension scheme with 5% employer contribution
• Regular socials and away days
• Weekly breakfasts and a ‘show & tell’ to start and finish the week together
• Monthly development days where we work on personal projects
• Funded training opportunities
• Regular team surveys and a virtual suggestion box
• Enhanced parental leave
• 10 days ‘working vacation’ from any location
• Paid opportunities to volunteer at local nonprofits

Our culture

Here’s a summary of what our studio culture is about:

Open dialogue: Everyone gets direct access to the leadership team and is encouraged to share their thoughts and ideas. We’re a dynamic business that seeks continual improvement. We’re not afraid to make changes if we see the value so everyone on the team can help shape our future.

Development focus: We’re dedicated to supporting people’s growth and development. We have a regular review process to reflect and set goals. Alongside the everyday giving and receiving of feedback, we use the review process to consolidate helpful feedback into goals to provide everyone the opportunity to get better at what we do.

Healthy work-life balance: The company was founded on a desire to strike a good balance between home and work life. So whilst we’re passionate about what we do and committed to making great work, it’s important to us that every person on the team feels happy and valued - and finishes work on time. It’s rare to see us working into the night or on weekends, but if it happens then we give you back time off in lieu.

Wellbeing advocacy: We take wellbeing seriously. It’s always part of our check-in conversations and we’re signed up to the Being Well Together programme. We have a Wellbeing Lead, trained in Mental Health First Aid, and we offer all of our employees and their families private medical insurance, with online GP access and a self-referred mental health pathway.

Fair pay: We keep regular tabs on industry standards when it comes to salary and aim to reward people more than fairly wherever possible. We talk about salary in all of our reviews. We’re also registered with the Brighton & Hove Living Wage Campaign. It’s all part of building a team that feels valued.

Positive impact: As a business, we’re taking steps to increase the positive impact we have on our clients, team, community and planet. We collect feedback from our projects and along with our own debriefs, use what we find to improve future outcomes. We run employee satisfaction surveys to learn about how we can build a better workplace. We offer Animation for Good discounts to positive causes and paid volunteering opportunities for local nonprofits. We’re 1% for the Planet members and use climate-positive tools like Ecologi and B1G1 to give back.

Lovely working environment: We have a super studio space in the centre of Brighton (on the edge of the North Laine area), with plenty of natural light and everything you could want on our doorstep.

Nice-ness! We’re a friendly bunch who are welcoming, open and fun. We approach things with what we feel is the right mix of professionalism and appreciation that we’re lucky enough to make animations for a living… You can’t take that too seriously!