Designer Application

Designer — Job Description

Design is critical to creating great software — software that is useful, desirable, and marketable. You will have an impact at Atomic. Products you’ve worked on will come to life as working applications used by people in a variety of industries, and technology domains including web, mobile, desktop, and embedded.

We believe in a holistic view of design that includes planning, communication, aesthetics and implementation. This holistic view means the design role is shared and you can expect to collaborate closely with developers on your team throughout the product cycle.

Planning

Designers typically get involved early in our projects working on product design, user experience, information architecture, interaction design and more but you’ll never be working alone. We believe the best software comes from integrated, poly-skilled teams of generalist developers and designers.

Communication & Aesthetics

We know that great products require attention to space, unity, color, type, rhythm and detail. We believe in creating products that communicate with purpose and you will be expected to apply your skills here as well. Designers work closely, often working in pairs with other designers or developers to push their graphic design to the next level.

Implementation

As generalists, designers at Atomic are also implementers who turn inspiring thoughts and pictures into artifacts like HTML, CSS, and optimized images. You will be expected to know or learn tools that help you integrate as seamlessly as possible with your team. You will be exposed to HAML, SASS, various templating languages, deployment systems, and version control systems (git, svn, etc).

Validation

We expect our designers to have a philosophical bent toward validation and research. We use tools like lightweight user research and provisional personas to form hypotheses at the beginning of projects and then confirm our assumptions using paper prototypes, mock-ups and usability testing before, during and after development.

Project Management

Our teams are disciplined in their use of practices and tools. We estimate our work, track our progress, version our artifacts, and communicate consistently with customers. You’ll probably learn some new tricks along these lines, and we hope you help us continue to solve the interesting challenges of a fully integrated agile design and development process.

Atomic is a consultancy. As such, you’ll be empowered and expected to interact directly with clients to make an impact on a daily basis. This means you’ll need excellent communication skills. If you aren’t already, you’ll become comfortable and effective at understanding and discussing business goals, budgets and timelines with clients.

Marketing

In addition to your project work, you’ll help market our services in a variety of ways including participating in conferences, contributing to our shared company blog, networking within our client’s organizations and among your peers, and expending your creative energies in ways we will not attempt to predict.

How to Apply

1. Pick one question from the list below. Compose a thoughtful response. (We doubt anyone could provide a thoughtful response to these questions in less than a page.) And, yes, spelling, grammar, and punctuation most definitely count.
2. Mail the following to jobs AT atomicobject.com
   • Your contact info
   • Your resume
   • Your response to one of the questions

You’ll hear a response soon after you contact us. If we are delighted, intrigued, or otherwise impressed with your submissions, we’ll go from there. Please note that we may at that time ask for additional information like references as part of our selection process.

Pick a question:

1. Discuss a situation where you were given too much to do, in too short of a time frame. How did you organize your work? What kind of work habits did you adopt? How did you manage the expectations of others?
2. Recount a time when you realized a closely held belief on how to approach your work was wrong. How did you respond?
3. What is the most difficult aspect of creating software products? What is the best way to address this reality of product development?
4. Tell us about a situation where you tried to change an organization or introduce an innovation. This doesn’t have to be a situation where you necessarily succeeded.