Product Designer

Who we are:

Pixel Union and Out of the Sandbox (https://outofthesandbox.com/) are leading designers of premium themes and apps for the Shopify ecommerce platform. We’re focused on helping our merchants — entrepreneurs, innovators, brands, and businesses large and small — succeed by providing them with the world’s best digital products, backed by exceptional customer support. The Out of the Sandbox brand theme collection includes the award-winning Retina theme, the revolutionary Flex theme and the high-performance, hugely popular Turbo theme.

About the role:

As a Product Designer for the Out of the Sandbox brand, you’ll help us build products that are accessible, intuitive and visually appealing to both merchants and end-users. You are passionate about solving product challenges through understanding a breadth of perspectives and needs related to the user experience.

Reporting to the Technical Director, you must be able to translate requirements into practical product features, with the ability to articulate the rationale for design decisions to project stakeholders. You’ll work collaboratively with developers, product managers, and our creative and marketing teams to define product specifications and design fully-functional, iterative products.

Success in the role is not just about creating outstanding work individually; it’s about collaborating effectively with others to produce a superior product that achieves specific aesthetic and data-driven goals. You’ll be part of a close team that sees strong communication, exploration, and collaboration as fundamental to its success.

You’ll be responsible for...

• Leading various UI initiatives, including the creation of wireframes, high-fidelity mockups, and interactive prototypes for various interfaces such as theme elements and app dashboards
• Advocating for UX best practices and design standards, with both the merchant and end-user (the shopper) in mind
• Reviewing, testing and approving design-related features, providing feedback and guidance to the development team to help achieve pixel perfection
• Working with the Creative Team to define and maintain features, settings and design direction for both upcoming and existing themes, including overall styling and micro-interactions
• Staying up to date on the latest industry trends and best practices and introducing new methods, tools and design directions into the products themselves

You’ll bring...

• A portfolio showcasing wireframes, hifi mocks, websites, app interfaces, interactive animations, or any other digital products for both desktop and mobile devices
• An ability to speak to your experience, workflow and design decisions made on past projects
• Experience with Figma, Sketch, or similar design tools
• Basic understanding of, and experience with, HTML/CSS/JavaScript and Github. We don’t expect you to code, but we expect you to know enough to understand how your designs will be translated to the web.
• Understanding of user experience workflows, how to implement them, and why they are used
• Ability to embrace feedback and adapt designs as required in collaboration with other designers and the rest of the team
• Detail-orientation, with a strong aesthetic sensibility and appreciation of good visual design
• Ability to work in a remotely distributed, collaborative environment, alongside the rest of our awesome and highly technical team

If you have these skills, that’s a huge plus!

• Ecommerce specific design experience
• Familiarity with the Shopify platform
• Experience with site map building and information architecture
• Comfortable tweaking styles in CSS, editing Shopify’s liquid templates and interacting with Git repositories
• Experience using a design methodology to improve workflow speed and efficiency
• Motion graphic and animation design
• Familiarity with accessibility and usability requirements

Please include a cover letter with your application – we’d love to better understand your background and experiences. We value diverse perspectives and believe that skills are transferable!

We are a company built on creativity, teamwork and employee well-being. We work hard, push our limits, and enjoy ourselves around fun, good people on challenging and rewarding tasks.

Some of our perks include:

• Competitive base salary
• Opportunity for growth as the company grows
• Exposure and learning across teams and services
• Health benefits and RRSP matching
• Company-sponsored fitness allowance
• Generous vacation policy
• Flexible work schedule and remote-friendly culture and systems

We bring passion and energy to our work, and believe that work should be rewarding, interesting, and come at a sustainable pace. Our team members can be found across Canada, the U.S. and the UK, and are well-adapted to working from home and the remote lifestyle. As long as you have a strong internet connection, you’ll be all set to join this dynamic team!