I applied for a job by writing this post
This is my application for the Product Designer role at Ghost. I figured if I was going to apply to a publishing platform, I should probably publish something :D
I have spent the last two years designing and shipping at early-stage startups. It was a good education. You learn fast when there is no one else to catch your mistakes, and you build a certain kind of confidence when you are the only designer in the room. At JeneeUs I was the sole designer on a 0 to 1 MVP. No senior to check my work, no process to fall back on. Just me, Figma, and a codebase I was shipping into directly. I owned it from research through production and that is how I prefer to work.
But fast has a cost. There is always another sprint, another deadline, another thing that needed to ship yesterday. After a while you stop asking whether something is good and start asking whether it is done.
I do not want to work like that anymore.
What I am looking for is a team that has time to care. Not slow for the sake of slow, but deliberate. A place where the question is "is this actually good" and not just "is this shipped." I sweat details. I care about type, spacing, motion, and the moments most designers skip because there is no ticket for them. That is not something I learned to do. It is just how I am wired.
So I made a trial site and spent time in the editor. Genuinely had fun with it.
The Unsplash integration is the kind of thing that makes you go "oh, nice" out loud. The card system is satisfying once you find it. Embedding just works. The whole thing has a clear point of view.
Want to see what id work on first?
Two small moments of friction stood out. The card system is not obviously discoverable, you kind of have to stumble onto it. And deleting a card has no visible affordance, no X, no button, nothing. You just have to know to hit backspace, which took me a beat. Both are small. But small things are exactly what Ghost should care about. As a designer that is interesting to me. There is something worth solving there.
My background is product design and design engineering. I have shipped production HTML and CSS, built design systems from scratch, run my own research, and handed nothing off to anyone. I like owning the full thing from idea to browser. I like small teams where everyone knows what everyone else is working on. I actively want critical feedback on my work because that is how you get better, not by protecting your decisions but by pressure testing them.
One more thing worth saying directly: I write well and I communicate clearly. For a fully remote team that runs almost entirely on written communication, that is not a soft skill. It is a core one. This post is probably the best evidence I can offer of that.
Ghost feels like that kind of place.
I built this post on Ghost. Setup to publish in under 30 minutes. That felt like a good sign.
