Visual Design Apprentice

What Liminal Is

We co-build with repeat founders, many of them unicorn founders, providing build expertise, capital, and unfair access from founding to Series B. We call ourselves a Founders' Studio because “venture studio” undersells what we do and oversells what most of them deliver.

What This Role Actually Is

• Build the visual layer for a venture: identity, interfaces, decks, assets.
• Turn positioning into something a founder looks at and says "that's us."
• Sweat what others don't see. Optical alignment. The weight of whitespace.
• Why one shade of blue reads "trustworthy fintech" and the one three hex values over reads "dental office."
• The work includes: visual identity and brand systems, product and digital surfaces, design system stewardship.

The Work

• Visual identity and brand systems.
• Translate brand strategy into complete visual identities: typography, color, layout grids, iconography, the overall look and feel that makes a venture cohesive across every touchpoint.
• Product and digital surfaces. Design clean, visually engaging UI for early-stage products: landing pages, dashboards, onboarding flows, marketing pages.
• You own the high-fidelity output and work directly with engineering so what ships looks like what you designed.
• Brand assets at scale. Decks, social content, one-pagers, investor materials, event collateral. Often the first thing the outside world sees. They need to be flawless.
• Design system stewardship. Build and maintain coherent design languages that hold up as the venture grows, so the hundredth asset looks as considered as the first.

Who You Are

• Exceptional visual craft. A portfolio that makes us lean in.
• Strong command of typography, color theory, composition, and layout across brand and digital surfaces.
• You know the difference between beautiful and merely pretty. You can explain why, in terms that aren't just vibes.
• Ambitious taste. Omnivorous and opinionated. You have feelings about restaurant menus, movie title sequences, transit signage, and the packaging on your toothpaste. Your taste is informed by what you've consumed across design, art, architecture, fashion, and culture.
• Tool fluency. Figma and Adobe Creative Suite are second nature. You work fast, iterate without preciousness, and produce high-fidelity output that doesn't need a translator between you and engineering.
• Comfort with ambiguity. No brand guides. No existing design systems. No “make it like the last one.” A founder, a blank page, and a company that needs to look like it was inevitable. That should thrill you.
• Contrarian streak. Independent thinker. Arguments from first principles. Unafraid of unpopular positions. You believe the best ideas survive open debate. You know how to disagree and commit.

Unicorn Points

• If you also have real UX instincts: information architecture, user flows, wireframing, usability audits. Bonus, not the job. The job is aesthetic sense and visual craft. That's the bar.

Apprenticeship, Not Internship

• Twelve months. Meaningful stipend. Embedded in a core projects alongside experienced builders. Not fetching coffee, that’s the leaders’ job. Not mocking up hypothetical case studies for a portfolio review.