Overview

• Visa sponsorship: Unfortunately, we are unable to offer visa sponsorship for this role. Applicants should have the right to work in the UK at the time of application.

• Background checks: Due to the non-partisan nature of the work we do with global governments and partners, all employees need to pass background checks, verifying your identity, education (if relevant), work history, sanctions, criminal record, adverse financial history, right to work, media and social media.

• You can expect to hear from us, no matter the outcome, by: 3rd August 2026

• Salary expectations: We aim for transparency on salary bands. If our range is misaligned with your expectations, we’d welcome an open conversation as early as possible.

About Apolitical

Apolitical's mission is to make governments smarter for people and the planet and we reach over 40 million public servants through our partnerships with governments globally. We are the largest global network for governments, used by 500,000+ public servants in 170 countries to find and share best practices and gain skills on critical topics from AI to climate change to emerging technologies.

Role

As Brand & Communications Designer, you will be responsible for bringing Apolitical’s brand, insights, products, and campaigns to life through high-quality visual communications.

You will work closely with stakeholders across Communications, Partnerships, Product, Research, Learning and leadership teams to create compelling visual assets that help communicate complex ideas, showcase data and insights, and strengthen Apolitical’s presence across digital channels, events, reports, and customer-facing materials.

This is a highly cross-functional role requiring you to work independently within established brand systems while helping improve design processes, asset management, and ways of working across the organisation. You will play a key role in ensuring consistency and quality across Apolitical’s external communications while adapting creative assets for a wide variety of audiences and formats. You will also have the opportunity to help shape our brand evolution.

You will also collaborate with external creative partners where required, helping develop briefs, provide design feedback, and ensure work aligns with Apolitical’s brand and communications objectives.

Key Responsibilities

Communications and campaign design

• Adapt existing templates and create bespoke visual assets for social media, email campaigns, events, product launches, and insights reports.

• Adapt and design event collateral and promotional materials for convenings including our flagship event Apolitical Day.

• Help shape creative approaches that support Apolitical’s strategic communications priorities.

• Design email campaign templates and create engaging and visually consistent communications across email channels.

• Create lightweight motion graphics and simple animations for social media, events, campaigns and product launches.

Insights and research visualisation

• Work closely with our Research and Communications teams to transform reports, analysis and thought leadership into visually engaging digital publications, with infographics and data visualisations.

Sales and partnership materials

• Design and maintain presentation decks, proposals and supporting materials for Sales, Partnerships and leadership teams.

Brand implementation 

• Apply, maintain and help evolve Apolitical’s visual brand identity.

• Collaborate with Product Design and Communications stakeholders to ensure alignment between product and communications experiences.

• Act as a day-to-day steward of Apolitical’s visual identity, all communications touchpoints adhere to our brand system.

Creative planning and process improvement

• Maintain and organise asset libraries, templates and design resources that enable teams to self-serve and produce on-brand materials.

Agency and external partner collaboration

• Brief, manage, and review work from external agencies and freelance partners in collaboration with Apolitical colleagues, ensuring all assets meet brand standards and quality benchmarks.

Onboarding Milestones

• Build a strong understanding of Apolitical’s mission, audiences, products and brand.

• Become familiar with existing templates, design systems, asset libraries and workflows.

• Deliver your first communications and campaign assets.

• Build relationships with key stakeholders across Communications, Partnerships, Product and Research.

• Take ownership of recurring design workstreams including social media assets, reports, presentations and email communications.

• Establish efficient workflows for managing requests and design priorities.

• Identify opportunities to improve asset management, templates and brand consistency.

• Become a trusted design partner for Communications and Marketing stakeholders.

• Be recognised as the go-to designer for external communications across the organisation.

• Deliver high-quality visual communications that contribute to stronger audience engagement and brand consistency.

• Implement improvements to design operations, asset libraries and team processes.

• Contribute to the successful rollout and adoption of Apolitical’s evolving brand systems and communications standards.

• Support effective collaboration with external creative partners where required.

About You

This is a great fit if you…

• Have experience working in communications, marketing, brand or graphic design roles in a fast-moving organisation.

• Can work independently and manage multiple projects simultaneously without requiring extensive creative direction.

• Have strong visual design skills across digital, social, presentation and publication formats.

• Enjoy translating complex ideas, data and research into engaging visual communications.

• Have experience working within established brand systems while adapting assets for new use cases.

• Understand how design supports communications objectives and audience engagement.

• Can confidently collaborate with stakeholders across different teams and levels of the organisation.

• Enjoy creating structure, systems and processes that improve efficiency and consistency.

• Are proactive, adaptable and comfortable working in a dynamic environment.

• Are motivated by Apolitical’s mission and excited about helping governments solve complex challenges.

• Know how to use AI-enabled tools to improve efficiency and creativity while maintaining strong human judgement and quality standards.

This won't be the right role if you…

• Prefer to focus exclusively on one type of design work rather than balancing multiple projects and formats.

• Need highly defined briefs and extensive creative direction to do your best work.

• Are looking for a people-management position.

• Prefer a slower-paced environment where priorities rarely change.

Make sure to call these out in your CV if you have them

• Strong graphic design experience across digital and print formats.

• A portfolio demonstrating excellence in communications, marketing, editorial or brand design.

• Experience creating social media assets, presentations, reports, campaigns and customer-facing communications.

• Strong layout, typography and visual storytelling skills.

• Experience designing infographics and data visualisations.

• Ability to translate complex information into clear, engaging visual content.

• Excellent attention to detail and commitment to brand consistency.

• Experience collaborating with multiple stakeholders and managing competing priorities.

• Strong organisational skills and the ability to manage multiple projects simultaneously.

• Strong Figma skills, basic Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop skills

• Familiarity with AI-assisted design tools and workflows or a willingness to learn quickly.

Make sure to call these out in your CV if you have them

• Experience creating lightweight motion graphics or simple animations.

• Experience developing templates, design systems or asset libraries.

• Experience briefing and providing feedback to external agencies or freelance designers.

• Experience working in mission-driven organisations, technology companies, media organisations or public sector-adjacent environments.

What Success Looks Like

Success in this role will be measured through:

• Consistent delivery of high-quality, on-brand communications assets across multiple channels.

• Increased efficiency and consistency through improved templates, asset libraries and design processes.

• Positive stakeholder feedback on responsiveness, collaboration and quality of output.

• Effective visual communication of Apolitical’s research, insights, products and campaigns.

• Strong adoption and utilisation of design resources and brand guidance across teams.

• Continuous improvement of design workflows, creative effectiveness and organisational design capability.

Don’t meet every single expectation? Studies have shown that women and people of colour are less likely to apply to jobs unless they meet every single qualification. Apolitical is dedicated to building a diverse and inclusive workplace, so if you’re excited about this role but your past experience doesn’t align perfectly with every qualification in the job description, we encourage you to apply anyways. You may be just the right candidate for this or other roles.

Application Process

Apolitical uses Applied in our recruitment. Applied aims to overcome unconscious bias in recruiting. Instead of using your CV alone, we'll be asking you to answer questions to test skills needed for the role. The answers are then anonymised, and reviewed in a random order by members of our team. 

The Applied platform also asks some demographic questions before you start your application.  These answers are never visible to the hiring team and don’t affect your application in any way. We only see summary statistics to help us check if our candidate pool is balanced and if everyone has an equal chance to get hired irrespective of their background. If you prefer, you can easily opt out of answering these questions.

Using AI in your application answers

At Apolitical, we embrace new technologies and encourage the use of AI in our work. AI helped us write this job advert! However, as AI becomes more prevalent, it can be difficult to distinguish between machine-generated content and the unique perspectives of candidates. We’re excited to see how you use AI tools to structure and refine your answers, but we value your unique insights above all else. Ensure your application reflects your voice and how your skills align with our mission.