Creative Jobs & Freelance Opportunities

Ning was created in 2004 and is an online platform for creating your own social networks for anything. Ning powers the largest number of social networks on the Internet and as we continue to grow, we are looking for Visual Designers to join our design team.

Our design team is responsible for the visual, interaction, and web design of Ning’s killer application - Your Own Social Network for Anything. We give people the freedom to customize their networks on Ning at every turn, making our design challenges unique, interesting, and complex. From choosing and tweaking themes with a GUI editor to adding custom CSS to editing the PHP code of our app; our Design team rapidly iterates a complex set of interfaces based on both qualitative and quantitative feedback.

Responsibilities

• Build your own designs in production-level, standards-based XHTML and CSS.
• Craft designs that are both functional and beautiful.
• Work with our team of Product Managers and Engineers to brain storm ideas. Take that idea and turn it into a static mockup, and then into an actual “living” webpage, that can then, if necessary, have its interface details be refined in collaboration with an interaction designer.
• Continually seek to document, simplify and streamline an increasingly complex set of options we offer Network Creators and their members on Ning.

Requirements

• Basic interaction/interface design skills in addition to outstanding skills and experience in Visual Design.
• Proven experience creating production-quality, standards-based XHTML and CSS. Basic Javascript skills also desired.
• Basic Interaction Design Skills. You can take a set of static mockups and identify potential big problems in interaction, complexity, or user confusion. You can turn designs into production-level XHTML and CSS that developers can build on, but you can also recognize when more in-depth interaction design is required that you can’t provide.
• You live and die with your tools. Whether it’s Photoshop, or Fireworks, or Illustrator, you are a master of the tool of your choice and they can pry it out from your cold, dead fingers. You know that Dreamweaver is nice, but also you know that the real work in web development is done with Firebug, Textmate, Ultraedit, or just plain Notepad.
• Basic understanding of development processes and tools. You have used in the past tools such as version control and you don’t need to be convinced they’re a necessary evil. Code doesn’t scare you. You can whip up a page in PHP, Ruby or Python to show how a flow should work, or you can use basic Javascript to mockup dynamic behaviors in a page.
• Curiosity. You've already created a social network and will bring great technical and operations related questions to the interview process.
• An online portfolio for our team to review.