Visual Design Apprentice

The Short Version

You make things beautiful. Not "clean and modern" beautiful—stop-scrolling, zoom-in, who-made-this beautiful. You'll design the visual identity systems, product interfaces, and brand assets for ventures that don't exist yet.

What Liminal Is

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

What This Role Actually Is

Let's be honest about a dirty secret in design hiring: the Venn diagram of great visual designers and great UX designers is two circles politely nodding at each other from across the room. We're hiring for the visual circle. Emphatically.

You'll create the visual layer for everything our ventures put into the world—identity systems, typography, color, layout, landing pages, product interfaces, pitch decks, social assets. You're the person who turns a brand strategist's positioning framework into something a founder looks at and says "that's us." You sweat the details other people don't even see: optical alignment, the weight of whitespace, why that particular shade of blue reads as "trustworthy fintech" while the one three hex values over reads as "dental office."

You'll work across multiple ventures simultaneously, adapting your visual instincts to wildly different industries and audiences without defaulting to the same bag of tricks.

Nuts and Bolts of What You'll Actually Do

Visual identity & brand systems. Translate brand strategy into complete visual identities—typography systems, color palettes, layout grids, iconography, and the overall look and feel that makes each venture cohesive across every touchpoint.

Product & digital surfaces. Design clean, visually engaging UI for early-stage products—landing pages, dashboards, onboarding flows, marketing pages. You'll own the high-fidelity output and work directly with engineering to ensure what ships looks like what you designed.

Brand assets at scale. Decks, social content, one-pagers, investor materials, event collateral. These aren't afterthoughts—they're often the first thing the outside world sees, and they need to be flawless.

Design system stewardship. Build and maintain coherent design languages that hold up as ventures grow, so that the hundredth asset looks as considered as the first.

You Should Have

Exceptional visual craft. A portfolio that makes us lean in. Strong command of typography, color theory, composition, and layout across both brand and digital surfaces. You know the difference between beautiful and merely pretty—and you can explain why in terms that aren't just vibes.

Exquisite 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—not just what Dribbble served you last week.

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 excite you.

A contrarian streak. We prize independent thinkers who form their own opinions and defend them with reason, not volume. You believe the best work survives open critique, not design-by-committee and therefore cherish freedom of speech and debate, but you know how to disagree and commit.

Unicorn Points If

You also happen to have real UX instincts—information architecture, user flows, wireframing, usability audits. But let's be clear: this is bonus, not the job. The job is exceptional aesthetic sense and visual design craft. That's the bar. Everything else is gravy. That said, designers who are genuinely excellent at both visual and experience design are rare, and if you're one of them, say so. We'll notice.

You Might Be

A killer graphic design misfit graduating from RISD in a couple months looking for their first real break. Or a junior designer at an agency who's tired of making the same SaaS landing page for the fourteenth time and wants to build brands from scratch. Or a self-taught designer with a freakishly good portfolio who skipped design school entirely because they were too busy actually designing things.

This Is an Apprenticeship, Not an Internship.

12-month commitment. Meaningful stipend. You'll be embedded in core projects alongside experienced builders—designing real identity systems for real companies, not mocking up hypothetical case studies for a portfolio review. If you've got the craft and the taste and you're looking for the place where both actually matter, this is the door. It doesn't have a handle. You have to know it's there.