Head of Design

The Texas Tribune is at a critical inflection point: a new CEO, a sharpened strategic vision, and a rapidly evolving media landscape shaped by AI and shifting consumer behavior. We have strong journalism, brand, and reach, but we need to elevate the experience around them. We’re looking for a Head of Design to help lead that transformation. The Tribune exists to pursue the truth so Texans can shape our future. Design has a critical role to play in that mission: helping people find accurate information, understand it, engage with it, and ultimately participate more fully in the civic life of Texas. This is not a maintenance role. You’ll define how the Tribune looks, feels, and works across products, brand, editorial, audience, and emerging platforms. You’ll raise the bar for quality while building a modern design practice from the ground up. As the Tribune reaches millions of Texans across an increasingly fragmented information ecosystem your job will be to make each experience feel like one Tribune, while adapting to the context of each surface. AI creates an entirely new design challenge. As the way people discover and interact with information changes, you’ll help define new experiences and products for journalism — balancing usefulness, innovation, trust, and editorial integrity. Reporting to the chief product and technology officer, you’ll be a key thought partner in shaping the future of the Tribune. This is a hands-on leadership role for someone who thrives in ambiguity, loves solving new problems, and wants their work to matter — someone energized by having a broad canvas, high standards, and the opportunity to shape what comes next in a lean, mission-driven environment. What You'll Do Design the audience relationship Own the experience from discovery through engagement, membership, and retention. Most of our readers arrive from somewhere else and leave without a trace; your work determines whether that changes. This is information architecture, navigation, conversion surfaces, and the design of how we ask things of readers, done well enough that it earns trust rather than spends it. Build an AI-native practice on the team You’ll set the direction for how design works in an AI-native world, covering tools, workflows, and team structure, so that velocity and craft rise together. This is a player-coach role, and it will stay that way for a while: you’ll lead strategically while staying close to the most important work. Raise the craft of everything we ship Our journalism is excellent and our product surfaces don’t always match it. Legibility, hierarchy, findability, and mobile comfort are real problems with real audience consequences. You’ll lead that work directly, hands on the pixels, and build the design system that keeps quality from regressing. Create a coherent Tribune experience Connect product, brand, editorial storytelling, audience, membership, and events into a recognizable whole, adapted to each surface rather than stamped onto it. Set the standard for how the Tribune looks and behaves everywhere, and manage the external partners who help us get there. Lead design across the organization Partner closely with internal stakeholders and bring design into decisions early to help make it a strategic function rather than an order-taking service. A meaningful part of this role is balancing stakeholder and department needs against design and brand strategy. Shape what’s next in AI and Product Help define what it means for a trusted news organization to build with AI. The Tribune has an opportunity to go beyond using AI as a behind-the-scenes efficiency tool and explore entirely new ways for people to discover, understand, navigate, and interact with journalism. You’ll help identify where AI can create genuinely better experiences, shape the interaction models and product concepts around them, and establish a design language for experiences that may not look or behave like traditional websites and apps. Requirements 6+ years of design experience with meaningful work on both brand identity and digital product. A portfolio that includes at least one design system you built from scratch or seriously evolved, starting from a brand identity rather than inheriting an existing component library. A real track record of shipping brand identities and web experiences for clients or products people use daily. Current, working knowledge of AI tools applied to design workflows (generative image tools, LLM-assisted copy exploration, prototyping acceleration, or comparable) used in a way that's changed how you work. Experience working in a consultancy, agency, or multi-stakeholder environments where you've had to context-switch across business lines and brand voices without losing rigor.