Multidisciplinary Designer / Photographer

ABOUT THE ROLE Boomkat is looking for an experienced multidisciplinary designer and photographer to join our small team in Manchester. This is not a graduate or entry-level position. We're looking for someone with substantial professional experience who can work confidently and independently across photography, moving image and graphic design, combining strong technical ability with excellent visual judgement, accuracy and an understanding of the demands of commercial work. It's an unusual combination of disciplines, so we're less concerned with your current job title than with the quality of your work, your experience and the ideas you can bring to the role. ABOUT BOOMKAT Established in Manchester in 1998, Boomkat is an independent online record store specialising in innovative, exceptional and often overlooked music from around the world. Alongside the store, we work closely with artists and labels and are involved in releasing and presenting music across vinyl, CD, cassette and digital formats. Physical objects and how they are presented have always been an important part of what we do. We care about photography, typography, record sleeves, print, film and the wider visual culture surrounding music, and we're looking for someone who shares those interests. WHERE WE'RE HEADING We've recently launched a completely redesigned Boomkat website, and this role comes at a point when we want to make a similar step forward in the visual work surrounding it. We have an established photographic style and a strong sense of what Boomkat is, but we're not looking for someone simply to maintain what already exists. We want to improve and develop how we photograph the things we sell, considerably raise the ambition of our moving-image work, and bring more creative thinking to the way Boomkat and the music we care about are presented visually. We're looking for someone who will take an active part in that process — bringing their own ideas, references and experience, questioning things when they can be better, and helping us work out what the next version of Boomkat's visual language should look like. THE ROLE A significant part of the role is photography. You'll be responsible for photographing the records, books, tapes and other physical releases that appear on Boomkat. We have an established in-house photographic style and a high standard of consistency and accuracy, so you'll need to be able to understand and work confidently within that from the outset. At the same time, we don't want things to stand still. We're looking for someone with the experience and imagination to develop that visual language, experiment with new approaches and bring strong ideas of their own. Moving image is increasingly important to us. We want to develop a much stronger and more distinctive approach to video around the music and physical releases we sell and release ourselves. This includes shooting and editing short-form work for social media and our website , but we're less interested in simply producing "content" than in finding interesting and visually distinctive ways of presenting music and physical objects through moving image. We want the person joining us to play an important part in shaping what that looks like. You'll also work on graphic design projects, particularly artwork and layouts for vinyl, cassette and CD releases, alongside occasional work across other areas of Boomkat. A sophisticated understanding of typography and layout is essential. This is a creative design position rather than a production-artworking or pre-press role. Technical preparation of finished artwork for manufacture isn't part of the job. EXPERIENCE We're looking for somebody who already has significant professional experience in photography and visual design. You should be comfortable working in a commercial environment where deadlines are real, details matter and work needs to be delivered accurately and consistently. You'll need to be capable of managing your own workload, prioritising competing requirements and taking a project from brief through to a finished piece of work without requiring constant supervision. We're deliberately not specifying an exact number of years of experience. The quality and breadth of someone's professional work matters more to us than whether they've been doing it for five years or ten. However, this isn't a position intended for recent graduates or someone looking for their first professional creative role. WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR We're looking for somebody with strong visual judgement and cultural awareness as well as technical ability. You might currently be a photographer who also designs and works with moving image; a multidisciplinary designer with particularly strong photography skills; or somebody whose career has naturally moved between these disciplines. We're looking for: • Excellent professional photography skills, including a strong understanding of lighting, composition, colour and image processing. • Profes