Senior Brand Designer (Freelance)

Senior Brand Designer (Freelance)

Aura, end-of-life services · Freelance · Remote (UK)

About Aura

Aura is becoming the UK's navigator through end of life. We built the company around a simple idea: the industry treats death as a transaction, but for the families we serve, it's one of the hardest and most important moments of their lives, and they deserve to be met with care.

We started with direct cremation and prepaid funeral plans, and we're building the deeper service families have told us they want. Help before the moment, when they're planning ahead. Help through it, when they need us most. Help after, in the weeks that follow.

The category is changing. Traditional funerals are declining. Direct cremation is going mainstream. Our ambition is to become one of the biggest brands in end-of-life services in the UK, and we get there by building something obviously and meaningfully better than the rest of the market, not by matching brand spend for brand spend with the incumbent. We're family-run and FCA-regulated, rated 4.9 on Trustpilot, 5 stars from Fairer Finance, and Gold winners at the UK Customer Experience Awards.

The rebrand

We're running a full rebrand: new positioning, a new verbal identity and a new visual identity. We're in the middle of the strategy work right now, built on deep customer research and a thorough audit of the category, and we're looking for a senior freelance brand designer to create the visual identity that brings it to life.

What we're trying to achieve is simple to say and hard to do: a genuinely distinctive brand, with assets that are unmistakably ours.

The challenge

Let's be honest about the category. There are some strong brands in it, with real recognition and decades of trust behind them, and several have done a better job on brand than we have so far. On product, service and what customers say about us, we're up there with the best. On brand, we're behind.

We don't intend to stay behind. The job is to build the most distinctive brand in the category, and to do it in a sensitive space, death, grief, money and family, where getting the tone right matters as much as standing out.

Who we're looking for

• A creator of unique brands. You've built identities with truly distinctive assets: work that's recognisable at a glance and impossible to confuse with anyone else in its category.
• An eye for detail. Exceptional craft in typography, colour and art direction, carried through consistently from the big idea to the smallest application.
• Experience with brands like ours. You've worked on consumer brands in sensitive or trust-critical categories, such as health, charity, later life, or finance with heart, and you can work with warmth and gravity without slipping into cliché or coldness.
• A systems thinker. A senior independent designer (or one-person studio) whose portfolio shows full identity systems, not just logos or UI screens, and who documents well.
• A partner, not a pair of hands. You build from strategy, you're comfortable pushing back when you think we're wrong, and you raise the ambition of the people around you.

How we'll work together

• Immersion first. We'll hand you the strategy, the customer research and our competitor audit, so you're building on real foundations rather than starting cold.
• Then the design work, together. The strategy gives us the foundations, and you'll be in the room as it lands: we'll shape the creative direction with you, and you'll lead the design from there.
• Close, collaborative, weekly. You'll work directly with Mark (brand and marketing) and Dave (our CEO), with a weekly review rhythm.
• How we work. Warmth, honesty, and treating customers as intelligent adults navigating something genuinely hard. High ownership, speed with craft, and low ego.

The main deliverables

• The identity. Wordmark, colour palette, typography, art direction, and the core brand devices and layout principles that make Aura recognisable at a glance.
• Proof across hero touchpoints. Application to key pieces across web, paid social and print, so the identity is shown working, not just presented.
• Brand guidelines. A working toolkit the team can actually build with, not a PDF that sits in a drawer.
• A team set up to execute. You'll work alongside our in-house designer on the execution side, so the team has exactly what they need to roll the brand out everywhere, including the launch of a new website.