Founding Brand Designer

Job description

## About Phonely At some point in the future, every business will answer their phone with voice AI. We are building the platform that lets them do that, and optimize every conversation along the way. Phonely builds conversational voice AI agents for high volume phone workflows. Our customers use us to qualify leads, book appointments, route calls, and resolve real customer conversations in production. We are growing fast, and how we look has not kept pace with what we have built. ## About the Role Voice AI is the hardest category to make visible. What we sell is a conversation on a phone call, with nothing to screenshot. The category has settled for the same gradient and the same waveform. Whoever solves that sets its visual standard, and that is this job. You are our first design hire, and you will own how Phonely looks everywhere: site, product, campaigns, sales and stage. You are not starting from a blank page and you are not inheriting a finished one: there is a logo set, a website direction in flight, and a standard for our published work. Your first call is what survives. Your first deliverable is the system that makes the answer repeatable. ## What You'll Do - **Own the identity:** one direction, and the rules that hold it across every surface. - **Build the design system:** tokens, components and the templates that let the team stay on-brand without you in the room. - **Bring the product onto the system:** the app today runs more than one logo, palette and button style. You set the standard and work with the frontend engineers until every customer-facing screen matches it. - **Make the invisible legible:** turn call flows, funnels and agent behavior into visuals a buyer understands at a glance. - **Ship the marketing site:** landing, comparison and vertical pages, built live, forms wired and tested. - **Carry the launches:** campaign systems, product marketing collateral, competitive material, customer stories and conference presence. The first customer story is written and waiting on you. - **Set the standard for executive communication:** the formats the founders take to customers, investors and the stage. ## What You'll Bring - 5+ years designing brand systems and the marketing surfaces built on them, with a portfolio that shows range and a point of view. - A brand system you wrote the rules for, not only a logo you drew. We will ask to see the document. - Command of typography, layout, hierarchy and color, across web, presentation and print. - You ship to production, not to a handoff. You build the site yourself in Webflow, or in a tool you can be fast in inside a week. - Comfortable as the first designer: you set the bar, defend a direction in plain language, and change it when the argument against it is better. ## Key Outcomes, First 90 Days - One direction chosen, documented, and adopted on every surface. - The system live (tokens, components, templates), the marketing site rebuilt on it, and the product adopting it. - The first customer story published in the new format, and launch and event assets ready ahead of the calendar. ## Why Join Phonely We are a team of ex-athletes, founders, and builders with low egos and high standards. We take the work seriously without taking ourselves too seriously. On-site in San Francisco, meals covered, quarterly offsites to interesting places (Rocky Mountains, Costa Rica, Indonesia), and meaningful equity in a company that is growing fast. You will work directly with the founders and own the brand from the ground up, with positioning, messaging and verified numbers reaching you as written briefs. ## Interview Process 1. 30-minute call to evaluate fit. 2. Portfolio review: one system you wrote the rules for, one site you built. 3. Take-home: pick one Phonely surface, rebuild it, and walk us through the reasoning. 4. Final conversation with leadership.