Visual Design Apprentice

The Short VersionYou 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 IsA Founders' Studio. 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 IsDirty secret in design hiring: the Venn of great visual and great UX designers barely overlaps. We hire for the visual circle. Emphatically.You build the visual layer for a venture: identity, interfaces, decks, assets. You turn positioning into something a founder looks at and says "that's us." You 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 WorkVisual 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 AreExceptional 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.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 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 IfYou 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. Designers genuinely excellent at both visual and experience design are rare. If you're one, say so. We'll notice.Apprenticeship, Not InternshipTwelve 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. If you've got the craft and the taste and you're looking for the place where both actually matter, this is the door.