Location: Flexible
Please apply by March 7, 2025 to ensure we see your application.
The Marshall Project seeks a Designer to join our product team. As a designer at The Marshall Project, you will work with the Director of Product to elevate our award-winning digital journalism through visual storytelling, communicate the value of our newsroom's work, and engage our audiences by improving our product offerings.
There is no single ideal lab-designed candidate. We like complex people with unique backgrounds and a diverse set of strengths. You may be a print designer by training who pivoted to digital storytelling. You may be a creative technologist who enjoys dreaming up designs and also building them. You may be a journalist who parlayed their love of words into a passion for typography and information architecture.
You probably have at least three years of experience building digital products with teams, but maybe you've found your own way (freelancing? side projects?) to build a strong portfolio that proves you can pull your weight.
Research shows that underrepresented applicants tend to downplay their qualifications. What's more important to us are the experiences you've had and the expertise you've developed. This is not an entry-level position, and we are looking for someone with practical and practiced skills. However, whether you have 4+ years, or only 2 years of non-traditional working experience, if you think you'd be a good fit, please apply.
Your experience probably includes:
A strong portfolio demonstrating the ability to solve design problems, develop complex and creative UX solutions, extraordinary capacity for visual design and information architecture, and the ability to articulate your process.
- An understanding of layout, typography, and design systems as applied to digital products
- Proficiency with design and prototyping software like Figma, Illustrator, Photoshop and/or Frame
- A commitment to building an inclusive and thoughtful workplace
We'd be particularly delighted to hire someone who has:
- Deep knowledge of current web, design, and online journalism trends
- Demonstrated digital news design experience, or abiding interest in news and storytelling
- Interest in the criminal justice system, including personal or family experience of incarceration
- Conversational understanding of HTML/CSS/Javascript
- Experience using qualitative research and data to inform product and design decisions
- Experience hiring, art directing, and communicating with freelancers
- Data visualization chops
If you don’t have this exact combination of skills, that’s fine. Let us know what your strengths are, and tell us about other skills you have that we didn’t ask about that you think will help our newsroom’s efforts.
Most importantly, you:
- Are curious, thoughtful, and critical
- Excel at collaborating with people with a wide range of talents
- Enjoy learning and teaching in equal measure
- Understand what makes good stories tick
- Have informed opinions on aesthetic design, and a willingness to both take feedback and advocate for design integrity
- Consider all parts of the experience when designing, from copy to visuals to user experience to business models
Typical examples of what your work might look like
- Manage the design of an issue of News Inside, our award-winning print publication, which is distributed in hundreds of prisons and jails across the United States
- Develop a design treatment for an editorial series on prison music
- Design a reusable audio component that allows journalists to feature compelling audio from their reporting
- Improve the user experience of our internal content management system so that stories are easier to produce
- Create a compelling, easy-to-understand data visualization for a story on the myth of the criminal immigrant.
- Conduct an accessibility audit of type treatments across our products and suggest improvements
- Redesign our email signup experience so that our readers better understand the value of each newsletter product
Who You’d Be Working With
This position is on the product team and reports to Director of Product Elan Ullendorff. You would be working very closely with the rest of the wonderful product team — Aithne Feay, Ana Méndez, Gabe Isman, Katie Park and Ryan Murphy — and collaborate with people across the newsroom, including reporters and editors, as well as the News Inside, audience, multimedia, engagement and data teams.
Who We Are
The Marshall Project is a nonprofit news organization dedicated to covering America’s criminal justice system. In 2016 and 2021, The Marshall Project was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. We have also been honored with the Goldsmith Prize, multiple National Magazine Awards, and for General Excellence from the Online Journalism Awards. We are not advocates — we follow the facts, and we do not pander to any audience — but we have a declared mission: to create and sustain a sense of urgency about the criminal justice system. We do not generally cover breaking news, although we curate the reporting of other news outlets in our morning newsletter. Our work includes investigative and explanatory projects and shorter pieces aimed at highlighting stories that other news organizations miss, underestimate or misunderstand. To ensure our work reaches a larger audience, we partner with other media outlets; we have worked with more than 200 newspapers, magazines, broadcasters and online sites.
We are an equal opportunity employer, committed to diversity. We welcome qualified applicants of all races, ages, ethnicities, physical abilities, genders and sexual orientations, including people who have been incarcerated or otherwise involved with the criminal justice system.
Compensation and Benefits
This job is full-time, with a competitive salary and benefits including:
100% employer-paid medical, employer-subsidized vision and dental insurance; matching traditional and Roth 401k (immediate vesting). Voluntary benefits include: Health and Dependent Care FSA, commuter benefits, pet insurance, short and long-term disability insurance, employee and dependent life insurance, AFLAC accident, hospital indemnity, and critical illness coverage, legal benefits, personal excess liability insurance, and employee discount marketplace. We also observe 17 days of paid time off each year (in addition to office closure between Dec. 24 and Jan. 2), and provide 20 weeks of paid parental leave.
Annual Salary Range: $95–$110k
The Marshall Project has office space in New York, but this job can be filled remotely.
This job is represented by the Marshall Project Guild.
How to Apply
To apply, use this form to share a resume, your portfolio, and answers to a few questions. We do not ask for a cover letter.
We try to respond to all applicants, one way or another, but due to the expected volume of applications, please expect that it will take some time to hear back from us. It usually takes us at least a month to review applications.
The deadline to submit an application is 11:59 p.m. EDT on March 7.
Office Hiring Hours
In order to help candidates prepare a complete and comprehensive application, we are making our team available for office hours during this hiring period. If you have questions that haven’t been answered by this job posting or you are wondering how our process works, please register for one of our sessions below.
Wednesday, February 12th at 4 PM ET | Register
Friday, February 28th at 12 PM ET | Register
These sessions are anonymous to the audience (unless you unmask your identity) but the hiring managers on the call WILL be able to see the email / name you registered with.