Pleasant Solutions Careers

Positions Available:

• Full time graphic designer.
• We are also hiring for other positions (including web designers, video editors, motion graphic designers, UX designers, front-end developers, and marketing project manager). If you know someone in any of these areas, please do them a quick and friendly favour by letting them know about this posting.

Position Overview:

• Full time and permanent.
• Flexible hours (for example: choose to start your day between 6am and 10am, work late some days and shorter on others).
• 85% internal projects (for multiple product lines), 15% client projects.
• Focus on achieving noticeably remarkable and portfolio-worthy results, with only some projects that simply need to be done in a short timeframe.
• Engage in constructive debate to challenge your design decisions; standing up for your choices, while being willing to use respectful criticism, with or without the sugar coating, to iterate into even better designs.
• Collaboration and support within a department including user experience (UX) designers, web designers, video team, writer team, and SEO team.
• Environment allows for some privacy at your workstation as well as time to concentrate without distractions when you need it.
• High end equipment to work with (triple monitors with a 40” monitor, pen tablets, whatever keyboard or mouse you want us to buy, etc.).
• Generally, you will get a variety of three types of work, as listed below, with an overall majority of the work being aimed toward an online presence rather than traditional media or print.
• #1: Creative concept ideation for numerous in-house brands including Pleasant Solutions itself and our products. A wide array of projects including designs for websites, ads, brochures, signage, and more.
• #2: Production design for our in-house brands.
• #3: Design and consulting for clients, typically as add-ons to technical client projects. Some of these are short-term projects such as redesigning homepages or designing the look of a mobile application, and others are entire from-scratch branding projects related to commercializing software or building of templates.
• Does not involve a boring stream of business card templates or working on the same type of project over and over again.
• Does not involve constant tight deadlines nor overtime that lead to results you are not proud of; there is pressure but it is manageable and work has steady hours.
• Does not involve wasteful bureaucracy or processes.

Requirements:

• Extensive knowledge of graphic design.
• Very strong aesthetic sensibilities.
• Experience using industry standard professional graphic design software, such as Adobe Illustrator, InDesign, and/or Photoshop.
• Passionate about design, with a deep appreciation for how it can impact usability and user experience.
• Ability to create designs from scratch, as well as leveraging stock photos and vectors into work when beneficial.
• Excellent communication skills, with English fluency.
• Excited to dive into challenges, and will persevere at length to achieve victory.
• Motion graphics and animation capabilities not required (although we can optionally make use of such secondary talents if you have them).
• No specific requirements for formal education or industry experience. We evaluate each applicant based on merit rather than formalities and we accept that some candidates might be new to a couple of the areas we have mentioned.

Nice To Have:

• Ability to see opportunities for improvement everywhere.
• Experience in website design an asset since there may be some overlap.
• Experience working at a creative agency or graphic design studio of some kind.
• Experience with graphic design for web applications.

About The Work Environment:

• Friendly, non-threatening, and non-political environment.
• Mid-sized company but retaining the speed and flexibility of a smaller company.
• We are a great environment for both outgoing people and those who are very shy and introverted (applicable to non-client facing positions).
• We strive to have every employee sitting near a window for natural light and to have plenty of plants throughout the office; we care about employee health.
• Free onsite massage therapy.
• Private nap rooms for isolated thinking time or for taking a nap if you didn’t sleep well last night.
• Atrium to enjoy the sun during lunch.
• Social events worth remembering (fencing competitions, curling, video game or board game parties, coding competitions, commando combat training, robotics club coming soon, etc).
• An example of our culture: Lunch together is in a very comfy sofa room, and even the quiet types are comfortable there.
• Unlimited access to pillage our kitchens for caffeine, sugar, healthy snacks, soups, and more :)
• Additional perks that are cost-shared like motorized sit-stand desks.
• Task focused: everyone in the company heavily uses centralized to-do lists to stay organized, prioritize, and coordinate.
• Fast paced
• Consistent work/life balance: mandatory overtime is very rare.

About The Company:

• Pleasant Solutions is a dynamic company headquartered in Edmonton, a large satellite office in Toronto and Vancouver, and small satellite offices across Canada (including in Calgary, Ottawa, etc).
• We have just recently launched a studio for our own innovative video productions as well as client contracted productions, but we have also been an enterprise software services company since 2007.
• The studio team has won multiple awards already.
• We are the most advanced video studio in Western Canada. We might also be, although not fully confirmed, the largest capacity video marketing studio in Western Canada except for television and news stations.
• Silicon Valley kind of excitement and growth potential.
• Fast growth: One of the 200 fastest growing technology companies in North America with 955% growth over 5 years (based on growth rates in published rankings of the 2014 Profit 500 and 2013 Deloitte Technology Fast 500). Canadian Profit Guide ranked us #88 out of 500 for fast growth in Canada, announced in Sept 2015.
• Stable and well diversified.
• Full of smart and passionate people whom you can learn from.
• Very low employee turn-over rate, attesting to the value of working here.
• As of 2021, we are more focused on in-house product development than previous years which had a focus on consulting services. Currently, our lead focus is on Sheetcast, a tool that lets non-technical people build their own full-blown web applications using spreadsheets, and which is beginning explosive growth (see https://Sheetcast.com) as well as privacy products as seen under Paranoid.com. We still do some software development services, electronics manufacturing, marketing services, and IT services. Other in-house products include the high-security Pleasant Password Server.
• An innovative technology company with an aim of achieving results in creative ways.
• Socially conscious (for example, we pay for employees to sponsor hundreds of WorldVision children).
• Achieved zero layoffs throughout Covid.

Applying:

• What do you have to lose by exploring the possibility? Applying does not take long and we keep your application confidential (never disclosed to existing employer).
• Apply online today at https://pleasantsolutions.com/careers/apply/graphic-designer
• Even if you don't have your resume updated or ready to go, apply anyway; we want to hear from you!
• Please do not apply via email, apply only by visiting the https://pleasantsolutions.com/careers/apply/graphic-designer site.

Keywords:

• Graphic design
• Graphic designer
• Graphic artist
• Artist
• Commercial artist
• Visual artist
• Digital illustrator
• Visual content creator
• Marketing graphic designer
• Creative designer
• Creative director
• Multimedia designer
• Interactive designer
• Concept designer
• Production artist
• Junior graphic designer
• Intermediate graphic designer
• Senior graphic designer
• Web interface designer
• User interface designer
• User experience designer
• UI designer
• UX designer
• Website designer
• Website design
• Web consulting
• Web consultant
• Website architect
• Web page designer
• Graphic design agency
• Graphic design studio
• Motion graphics animator
• Motion graphics animation
• Plurals:
• Graphic designs
• Graphic designers
• Graphic artists
• Marketing graphic designers
• Creative designers
• Creative directors
• Multimedia designers
• Interactive designers
• Concept designers
• Production artists
• Junior graphic designers
• Intermediate graphic designers
• Senior graphic designers
• Artists
• Commercial artists
• Visual artists
• Digital illustrators
• Visual content creators
• Web designs
• Web designers
• Website designers
• Web interface designers
• User interface designers
• User experience designers
• UI designers
• UX designers
• Web consultants
• Website architects
• Web page designers
• Graphic design agencies
• Graphic design studios
• Motion graphics animators
• Motion graphics animations