Senior Designer, Surface & Product Art

About the role

This is a role for an exceptional designer who creates the work directly. You will use Illustrator and Photoshop to produce the art yourself, taking source material, including vintage botanical plates, antique ephemera, archival illustrations, and commissioned fine art, and turning it into finished, unmistakably-IOD product art.

You will help decide what gets made: which assets a collection needs, which products they belong on, and where the right source material lives. You will make the calls on style, scale, and color, and on how a design is best presented, whether as a pattern, a vignette, or a border, for instance, grounded in how our community actually uses our products.

Responsibilities

• Refine the art
• Prepare source material into finished product art: isolating artwork from scans, restoring and matching historical typography so edits read as original to the piece, and selectively reworking tone and shading to a defined standard.
• Redraw, interpret, and separate colors into isolated color blocks for our paint inlays.
• Assess the quality and resolution of source material, making sure every image is crisp and clear before it moves to the production manager.
• Find a unifying thread that runs through an entire release so the products feel cohesive, while building in enough versatility and variety to give the collection range.
• Hand off finished art to the production manager, who prepares the final files for manufacturing.
• Shape the product
• Conceive collections and individual products: what to make, which asset each product needs, and how all of the products in a release work together.
• Source and curate material from historical archives, public-domain collections, commissioned fine artists, freelance illustrators, museum contacts, and antique dealers.
• Clear and document rights, licensing, and artist agreements for every source.
• Work with the team
• Partner closely with the founder, who is currently acting as IOD's Creative Director, taking concepts from a written brief to a finished collection with increasing independence and shortened revision cycles over time.
• Partner with the production manager, and over time help build and brief a roster of freelance designers and illustrators.
• Keep your creative decisions grounded in how things are actually made, so the work moves smoothly into production.

Requirements

• A portfolio of finished work, not just concepts and mood boards. We want to see real products and collections you have designed and created yourself.
• Expert hands-on skill in Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator.
• Demonstrated ability to work within an established aesthetic and produce work that feels natural to it, with a strong grasp of design principles, color theory, and decor design.
• A real eye for product: you understand what makes a collection cohere and which assets a product needs.
• An understanding of how creative decisions translate to physical manufacturing, so the work transitions cleanly into production.

Skills

• Deep familiarity with vintage and decorative-arts source material, and experience working with public-domain and archival art.
• A genuine love of the world IOD lives in: vintage design and home decor.
• A love of DIY and craft, especially decor.
• Experience sourcing and curating art from varied origins (archives, fine artists, illustrators, antique and museum sources).

Benefits

• Paid time off
• Sick leave

Pay

$95,000 - $125,000

Schedule

Full-Time ; Hybrid remote based in Roseville, CA