Lead Visual Designer

Our designers at Athena play a crucial role in bringing people together to inspire the best experiences and champion the people who use our products and engage with our brand touchpoints. Voted 2021 Most Innovative Company and Certified B Corp, we're all about bringing real financial wellness to Aussies, helping them rewrite their future stories.

**Our team is about**
- Owning customer outcomes, uncovering and sharing meaningful measures and taking actions that underpin customer conversion and customer joy in our experiences,
- Deeply understanding customer problems and needs,
- Creating brilliant strategies and executing creative designs across our e2e journeys.

As Lead Visual Designer working between Product and Marketing, you are responsible for leading the strategy and design of visual elements which fuse the functional needs of users with emotional values of design. You create masterful experiences with visual expressions that embody the Athena brand.

You'll play a hands on role in the delivery of project activities, driving and facilitating workshops, presentations and feedback sessions. You will share your deep knowledge and understanding of design fundamentals to help articulate and create context of our design vision to team members and stakeholders.

You'll be working closely with both Product and Marketing, with a core area of focus being our public site incl. conversion funnels and other owned channels.

**Your team will look to you for**:

- Leading and representing visual design across our experience, including ownership of our established design systems and contributing to our brand in close partnership with Marketing.
- Sharing your deep knowledge of UI design fundamentals and the role it plays in creating beautifully thoughtful products and experiences.
- Your understanding of design systems and the role they play within teams and products.
- How to translate and evolve our brand across our products, website and customer experiences.
- Articulating context and framing a vision through designs, prototypes and visual assets.
- A conceptual approach to your designs that ensures our brand, products and experiences continue to be a game changing.
- Guidance and new perspectives to design, being aware of current and emerging trends and technology to help push Athena's experience forward.

**What you'll be doing**:

- Craft beautiful, delightful and visually engaging product experiences that drive both commercial and customer outcomes.
- In partnership with Marketing and as a key person on the growth team, you will have a significant focus on evolving Athena's website design, using data and evidence to optimise for conversion.
- Leveraging the foundations we've built to continue to grow and evolve our design systems, as well as identifying areas of improvement; including documentation and ways of working and use with in teams throughout the business.
- Support and guide the Athena brands visual expression throughout all our products.
- Working closely with the engineering team to understand feasibility of designs from a technology perspective and ensure quality of everything we ship.
- Working closely with marketing and aligning on all brand activities and how this guides what we do across all our products.
- Participate in small research studies to validate hypotheses, elevate customer needs and facilitate evidence-based decisions.
- Communicating the context and intent of the work (demonstrating strong rationale through various artefacts as needed e.g. prototypes, handoff specs, visual designs etc), facilitating effective feedback and critique opportunities.
- Contributing to or leading, strategic initiatives that elevate design across Athena.
- Understanding big picture thinking. Whilst the detail is everything to you, designing experiences that use wider perspective is important to build a great customer experience.
- Contributing to how we design at Athena; helping improve our tools and process, bringing new thinking and ideas and ways of working to the team.

**We would like you to**
- Have 5+ years professional design experience with a strong focus on visual / UI (you may have had another title like UI designer, visual designer, digital designer, product designer)
- Have highly developed design skills with a strong portfolio showing both your aesthetic and approach, as well as, customer and commercial impact.
- Have excellent verbal and written communication.
- Have a deep understanding of design tools and systems (Figma etc.).
- Have experience collaborating in multi-functioning teams as a senior / lead visual designer.
- Have a good understanding of motion and interaction and the role it plays in bringing our brand to life.
- Comfortable with a degree of ambiguity, contributing to the definition, planning and execution of work as required and in partnership with other teams, Designers, Product Owners, Product Managers and Engineers in an Agile environment.

**It would be