Lead Digital Designer

Title: Lead Digital Designer Location: Denver, CO; Long Beach, CA

YOUR MISSION

The Lead Digital Designer defines how True Anomaly’s brand lives, moves, and communicates across digital experiences. Working closely with the Head of Graphic Design, Brand & Identity, and the broader Brand & Creative team, this role leads the design of major web, editorial, campaign, and interactive experiences. The role translates brand, content, product, and business strategy into compelling digital experiences and helps evolve the systems, patterns, and principles that support True Anomaly’s digital expression.

Your primary focus will be designing and evolving our web ecosystem, including a new editorial publication and an interactive company website. This is a hands-on design role for someone who combines exceptional visual craft with strong systems thinking, editorial judgment, and an understanding of how people experience content, products, and brands on the web. You can develop a bold creative direction within a broader creative framework, translate it into a flexible design system, and remain closely involved as the work is built and launched.

Beyond our core web platforms, you will contribute to product launches, integrated marketing campaigns, social content, and the digital expression of events and other significant brand moments. You will think across the end-to-end experience, understanding how individual interactions, content, and touchpoints work together to create a coherent relationship with the brand.

This is not a motion design role, but motion is an important part of the medium. You should understand how interaction, animation, transitions, and responsive behavior can improve hierarchy, storytelling, and usability and be able to concept and direct that work in partnership with motion designers and developers.

RESPONSIBILITIES

Web and Interactive Design

• Lead the creative development and design of True Anomaly’s company website, editorial publication, and other priority digital experiences.
• Translate brand, audience, product, content, and business objectives into clear digital concepts, information architecture, user journeys, page systems, and interaction models.
• Design responsive experiences from early concepts and wireframes through high-fidelity design, prototyping, development, quality assurance, and launch.
• Create high-fidelity interactive prototypes that communicate responsive behavior, motion, transitions, and complex user flows with enough specificity to guide implementation.
• Develop and articulate a distinctive point of view for how the True Anomaly brand behaves online across typography, imagery, layout, interaction, and motion, aligned with the broader brand direction set by Brand & Creative leadership.
• Partner with developers from the beginning of a project to explore what is possible in the browser and use technical constraints and emerging capabilities as inputs to the creative process.
• Balance expressive storytelling with clarity, accessibility, performance, ease of use, and the needs of different audiences.
• Maintain creative quality through development, testing, and launch.
• Review qualitative and quantitative signals after launch and evolve digital experiences based on audience behavior, content performance, and changing business needs.

Editorial Design and Publishing

• Create the design system for a new editorial publication that can support long-form journalism, technical storytelling, interviews, essays, multimedia, and evolving content formats.
• Partner with Editorial Content Strategy, Communications, Creative Strategy, and subject-matter experts to determine how stories should be structured and experienced.
• Partner with Editorial, Content Strategy, and developers to define the publication’s content model, taxonomy, CMS requirements, and relationships between stories, formats, authors, and topics.
• Design for the full publishing system—not only individual articles—including discovery, navigation, archives, series, author pages, related content, search, and emerging editorial formats.
• Develop flexible article templates and editorial components without making every story feel identical.
• Use typography, pacing, imagery, data, interaction, and motion to make complex ideas understandable and compelling.
• Ensure the system supports editorial flexibility, efficient publishing, accessibility, and long-term growth without sacrificing the character of individual stories.
• Help establish scalable workflows and standards for publishing and evolving content.

Digital Brand Systems

• Build and evolve reusable digital design systems, including typography, color, layout, components, interaction patterns, and motion principles, in partnership with the Head of Graphic Design, Brand & Identity and relevant creative and technical partners.
• Partner with internal teams and external collaborators to scale, refine, and evolve design across digital systems and experiences.
• Ensure consistency across the company website, editorial experiences, campaigns, launches, events, and social platforms.
• Create templates and kits of parts that allow the team to move quickly while maintaining a high creative standard.
• Identify when a digital experience should extend the existing system and when a moment warrants a more bespoke approach.
• Document systems and provide clear design direction to internal teams, developers, agencies, and production partners, escalating major brand or strategic decisions as appropriate.
• Explore emerging tools and formats—including creative coding, generative design, data visualization, real-time 3D, and AI-assisted workflows—when they create a more meaningful or effective digital experience.

Campaigns, Launches, and Brand Moments

• Develop digital creative for integrated marketing campaigns and product launches, including landing pages, interactive stories, digital toolkits, social assets, and supporting content.
• Partner with Product Marketing, Communications, Social, Events, and other teams to create cohesive experiences across channels.
• Shape the digital layer of important events, demonstrations, installations, and live brand moments.
• Adapt ideas intelligently across formats rather than treating each deliverable as an isolated asset.
• Maintain a high level of craft across both flagship experiences and faster-turn work.

Interaction and Motion for the Web

• Define how motion and interaction support navigation, hierarchy, comprehension, and storytelling across digital experiences.
• Create prototypes that communicate intended behavior, transitions, and responsive states.
• Collaborate with motion designers on more complex animation, films, and motion systems.
• Work closely with developers to ensure motion is purposeful, performant, accessible, and faithful to the design intent.
• Distinguish between moments that benefit from movement and those where restraint creates a stronger experience.

Strategy, Research, and Partnership

• Champion user research and audience understanding as inputs to creative direction, content structure, interaction design, and ongoing iteration.
• Frame ambiguous problems and opportunities through clear strategic briefs that connect audience needs, product and business objectives, content, technology, and brand.
• Present design vision, strategy, concepts, prototypes, and work in progress to creative leadership, business stakeholders, and cross-functional partners.
• Work closely with Creative Strategy to translate the company’s narrative, priorities, and product context into effective digital experiences.
• Partner directly with developers, content teams, product partners, and specialists from the beginning of a project to align creative ambition with technical feasibility and end-to-end experience needs.
• Prepare thoughtful design specifications, prototypes, assets, and annotations that enable high-quality implementation.
• Review builds across screen sizes, devices, browsers, and interaction states; identify quality issues and direct refinements before launch.
• Partner with content, analytics, accessibility, SEO, and performance specialists, using their expertise to improve the experience without independently owning those disciplines.
• Build and maintain a trusted network of digital studios, independent designers, developers, and specialist partners.
• Evaluate outside partners based on creative fit, technical capability, executional quality, and responsible investment.

QUALIFICATIONS

• 10+ years of experience in digital, web, brand, editorial, product, or experience design, with a track record of leading complex, high-impact digital platforms and cross-functional initiatives.
• A portfolio demonstrating exceptional web design, strong brand thinking, sophisticated visual craft, and final launched work. A portfolio link is required.
• Experience designing content-rich editorial, brand, product, or storytelling-focused websites and digital experiences.
• Strong command of typography, layout, hierarchy, image-making, responsive design, interaction design, and digital design systems.
• Experience developing digital work from concept through high-fidelity design, prototyping, development, quality assurance, launch, and ongoing iteration.
• Strong understanding of user journeys, information architecture, end-to-end experience design, accessibility, and responsive behavior.
• Experience using user research, audience insights, analytics, or other forms of evidence to inform design decisions and improve experiences.
• Experience designing for CMS-driven publishing platforms and collaborating on content models, taxonomies, and authoring workflows.
• Fluency in Figma and other current digital design and prototyping tools.
• Ability to prototype sophisticated interaction and motion using appropriate tools; familiarity with creative coding or browser-based experimentation is valuable.
• Ability to concept and direct motion and interaction for the web; hands-on motion design capability is valuable but not required.
• Experience collaborating closely with developers and enough technical fluency to understand feasibility, performance, implementation, and browser-related tradeoffs.
• Understanding of how accessibility testing, SEO requirements, performance constraints, and content strategy should inform design decisions.
• Experience presenting design vision, strategy, and work to creative leadership, business stakeholders, and cross-functional partners.
• Experience directing agencies, independent designers, developers, illustrators, motion designers, and other creative partners.
• Ability to work within defined budgets and schedules while protecting the quality and intent of the work.
• Strong presentation, communication, strategic thinking, and cross-functional collaboration skills.
• Comfort operating in a fast-moving environment where the function, systems, and workflows are still being built.
• Experience with data visualization, 3D, generative tools, creative coding, or other emerging digital formats is valuable but not required.
• Experience with technology, aerospace, defense, automotive, industrial design, or another technically complex category is helpful but not required.
• Genuine interest in aerospace, defense, or national security is a meaningful signal. Domain expertise is not required; intellectual seriousness about the mission is.

COMPENSATION

• Base Salary:  $135,000 - $200,000

• Equity + Benefits including Health, Dental, Vision, HRA/HSA options, PTO and paid holidays, 401K, Parental Leave

Your actual level and base salary will be determined on a case-by-case basis and may vary based on the following considerations: job-related knowledge and skills, education, location, and experience.

ADDITIONAL REQUIREMENTS

• Work Location—Successful candidates will be located near Denver, CO or Long Beach, CA, for hybrid opportunity.

This position will be open until it is successfully filled. To submit your application, please follow the directions below. #LI-Hybrid