We're a US-based startup building AI-powered tools for political communications. Our platform lets campaigns, elected officials, and advocacy organizations analyze their ad creatives — video, image, and audio — using AI, getting instant scoring, risk detection, audience fit analysis, and rewrite suggestions. Think "Grammarly for political ads."
We're not at the idea stage. We have production apps, real users, and revenue. The analysis engine works. What we need now is a designer who can take a powerful but technical product and make it **intuitive, beautiful, and premium-feeling**.
The Role
You'll be the first designer on the team, working directly with the founder and engineers. You'll own the entire design surface, from the marketing landing page to the SaaS dashboard to data-rich analysis results. This product is data-heavy and multi-format (video, audio, image), which makes the design challenge genuinely interesting: how to present dozens of data points, annotated transcripts, geographic maps, and AI-generated suggestions without overwhelming the user.
What you'll design:
* Marketing site: Landing page that converts visitors to signups. Premium, trustworthy, data-driven aesthetic.
* SaaS dashboard: Home screen with recent analyses, usage stats, and campaign folders. Visual-first, where thumbnails matter for creative work.
* Upload and context flow: Drag-and-drop upload for video, image, and audio, plus a multi-step context form including ad format, audience, geography, and goals.
* Analysis results: The core of the product. A tabbed dashboard showing overall scores, dimension breakdowns such as radar charts and gauges, annotated transcripts with color-coded risk and opportunity highlights, audience segment scoring, geographic heat maps, and prioritized fix suggestions.
* Copy improvement view: Side-by-side original versus AI-rewritten text with diff highlighting and score comparison.
* Variation comparison: Card layout comparing three to five AI-generated ad alternatives with scores and recommendations.
* Chat refinement interface: Conversational UI where users iteratively improve their ads with AI, including version history and context panels.
* Ad comparison tool: Multi-column side-by-side comparison of two to four ads across all scoring dimensions.
* Benchmark library: Filterable gallery of successful historical political ads for comparison.
* Settings, billing, and onboarding: Standard SaaS screens, executed with high quality.
What makes this design challenge interesting:
* Multi-format media: The same interface must handle video players with frame-accurate timestamps, image analysis views, audio waveforms, and text transcripts, each with distinct interaction patterns.
* Dense data, clear story: An analysis produces multiple scoring dimensions, demographic audience breakdowns, geographic scoring by state or district, risk flags by severity, and prioritized fix suggestions. The challenge is progressive disclosure, surfacing what matters while allowing deeper exploration.
* Inline annotation: Transcripts include highlighted spans for risks and strengths with click-to-inspect popovers, similar to code review UX applied to ad copy.
* Nonpartisan aesthetic: The design must feel premium and professional, avoiding partisan colors. Trust signals are critical due to sensitive campaign content.
* Comparison as a core pattern: Users frequently compare originals versus improvements, multiple variants, and benchmarks. Comparison UX must be first-class.
Design inspiration:
* Grammarly: Real-time feedback, clear scoring, inline suggestions.
* Figma: Creative tool UX, collaboration patterns, and polish.
* Descript: Video and AI interface with transcript-driven editing.
* Mixpanel: Data visualization and drill-down interaction.
* Notion: Clean workspace with high information density without clutter.
* Linear: Premium SaaS aesthetic and thoughtful defaults.
Design system direction:
* Tone: Professional, premium, data-driven, modern. Not partisan, cheap, or cluttered.
* Primary colors: Deep navy or charcoal with electric blue or teal accents.
* Semantic colors: Emerald for success, amber for warnings, deep red for errors, and cool gray neutrals.
* Typography: Modern geometric sans for headlines, clean sans for body text, and monospace for data and scores.
* Icons: Line icons with consistent weight, professional and not playful, media-specific for video, audio, and image.
* Data visualization: Consistent, accessible, colorblind-safe palette.
Frontend stack for context:
* React 19 with TypeScript: Component-based implementation.
* Tailwind CSS: Utility-first styling aligned with design tokens.
* Recharts: Bar, line, radar, and area charts for data visualization.
* Mapbox GL: Geographic maps with vector tiles and custom styles.
* Framer Motion (planned): Animations and micro-interactions.
You don't need to code, but designing in reusable components with consistent patterns and spacing will speed up implementation.
Requirements:
Must have:
* Three or more years of professional UX/UI design experience.
* Strong Figma skills.
* Portfolio showing complex dashboards or data-rich application design.
* Experience designing for SaaS or B2B products.
* Experience with responsive design for desktop and tablet.
* Ability to manage information-dense interfaces without clutter.
* Good written English for async communication, annotations, and documentation.
* Availability to overlap four or more hours with US Eastern time.
Strongly preferred:
* Experience designing data visualizations such as charts, graphs, maps, and score displays.
* Experience designing media-handling UIs including video players, audio waveforms, and image viewers.
* Experience creating and maintaining a design system or component library in Figma.
* Understanding of how designs translate to component-based frontend architecture.
* Experience with Tailwind CSS or utility-first design token systems.
* Experience designing chat or conversational interfaces.
Bonus:
* Experience in political technology, media, advertising, or analytics products.
* Animation and micro-interaction design skills.
* Experience with user research or usability testing.
* Understanding of accessibility standards such as WCAG 2.1.
* Interest in AI products and LLM-powered interfaces.
Deliverables:
Core:
* Design system or style guide including colors, typography, spacing, and components as a Figma library.
* Twelve key screens for desktop and tablet with all states including empty, loading, populated, error, hover, and focus.
* Prototyped user flows covering signup to first analysis and results, dashboard to upload and variations, and results to chat refinement and export.
* Marketing landing page with full-page design and demo video placeholder.
Bonus:
* Mobile adaptations.
* Animation and micro-interaction specifications.
* Dark mode variant.
* Email templates.
* White-label variant for agency tier.
Scope options:
* Full-time: Ongoing role owning all design work, ideal for a designer who wants to grow with the product.
* Project-based: Delivery of twelve screens and a design system, followed by part-time maintenance, ideal for freelancers who prefer defined projects.
* Part-time: Approximately twenty hours per week on an ongoing basis.
We prefer full-time but will consider project-based for an exceptional candidate.
How we hire:
* Portfolio review: We review your work before scheduling any calls. The portfolio is the most important signal.
* First call: A 25-minute conversation to discuss your background, review the product, and explore the design challenge.
* Design exercise: A paid exercise of four to eight hours to design two of the twelve screens from the brief. Compensation ranges from $100 to $200 regardless of outcome.
* Exercise review: A 30-minute walkthrough of your designs, decisions, and alternatives.
* Final call: A 20-minute conversation to confirm fit, logistics, and start date.
We value your time, and the design exercise is paid because it involves real work.
