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Sugar, a boutique Shopify theme

Today we're launching Sugar, our newest Shopify theme.

Sugar is a boutique theme designed to handle any size of catalogue. It displays your products efficiently with just the right amount of friendliness. Live search and custom filtering make it easy for your customers to find their way around and feel right at home.

The theme comes with three beautiful presets: Bright, Light and Warm. Sugar's multi-tiered sidebar menu makes it a breeze to organize your catalogue, feature products, display sale items, and advertise promotions. You’ll be social media-ready with customizable blog and Instagram widgets.

Get Sugar from Pixel Union or from the Shopify Theme Store for $140.

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We’re hiring a Marketing Manager

Pixel Union is looking for a Marketing Manager to join our team. We’re an interface design agency whose products are seen and used by millions of people around the world. We need someone to oversee all of our marketing efforts, connecting us with current and potential customers and engaging them through comprehensive online marketing campaigns.

You should have at least two years of web marketing experience, along with excellent writing and interpersonal skills. You have proven success creating integrated marketing campaigns and are confident with data analytics and setting up SEO, SEM, content marketing and drip campaigns. You have experience in partner/reseller enablement. You’re organized, comfortable in a fast-paced environment and great at managing deadlines.

As the market expert, you’ll know everything about our customers: who they are, how they buy, what criteria are most important. You’ll use site data to build a content strategy focused on SEO and a strong sales funnel. You’ll lead our marketing initiatives and identify new advertising opportunities; develop positioning, core messaging, and related materials for products and features across major channels (website, paid media, social, customer support); and collaborate with launch teams to align marketing and product goals.

We work in a collaborative environment with a global team, so communication is key to our success. That means connecting with team members regularly, giving and receiving quality feedback, and contributing ideas. You can work from our offices in Victoria or Vancouver, or you can work remotely. What’s most important is that you’re good people and a good cultural fit.

If this sounds like you, send a quick note to people@pixelunion.net.

[pixelunion-staff]

We're looking for Developers

Are you a developer in Victoria, Vancouver, or anywhere else with a stable internet connection? Do you love what you do, keep up to date on current development trends and techniques, and enjoy working with good people?

We’re looking for a full-stack developer with 2-3 years of experience (bonus points for an agency background). You have experience with Rails and are comfortable deploying to and maintaining apps on Heroku or similar. You're good with front-end JavaScript frameworks (ReactJS, Angular, Ember) and building RESTful APIs. Since you'll be working with our amazing design team, you should also understand Photoshop and Sketch at a basic level.

You will collaborate with other developers and designers to bring our clients' ideas to life. You'll be able to manage your own time and give progress reports to your project manager for the various projects you're working on. Your knowledge will guide clients through strategic product/app decisions, so an ability to speak comfortably about development and ideas is key.

Pixel Union is a tight-knit but fast-growing company. We value good communicators and overall nice people. Any experience you can bring from outside of development is useful, especially an understanding of how real people use technology. Millions of people see and use the products we build, so it’s important to keep them in mind. If you’re driven to do great work, open to improving your skills and get along with others, you’ll do well.

Send a quick note, resume and work samples to people@pixelunion.net.

[pixelunion-staff]

We’re hiring an Interface Designer

Pixel Union is growing and we need someone to join our interface design team. Here are a few things that are important to us—if it sounds like you might be a good fit, we’d love to meet.

Culture is important. Pixel Union is a tight-knit team of designers, developers and creatives from around the world. We’re growing quickly, but it’s important to us that we don’t lose the friendly, supportive, passionate ethos that got us here. If you’re driven to do great work, open to improving your skills and actually like people, you’ll do well.

Communication is important. We work in a collaborative environment with a global team, so good communication is key to our success. That means connecting with team members regularly, giving and receiving quality feedback, and contributing ideas. We don’t care where you live, but if you’re the kind of person who likes to work in a silo, it probably isn’t a good fit.

Design is important. It defines our reputation. We need designers who are driven, passionate and capable of producing work to the highest standards. Whether you’re working on an app with our agency division or designing our next theme, we want you to feel inspired by the process and confident about getting your work in front of millions of people.

Experience is important. Our clients are everyone from Fortune 500 companies looking to build the next great app to mom and pop shops starting their first online store. We build real products for real people and are looking for designers who understand good UX and can turn complicated problems into elegant solutions.

If this sounds like you, get in touch at people@pixelunion.net with a quick note and some examples of your work. We’ll go from there.

[pixelunion-staff]

Pangolin, our Tumblr theme skeleton

Our developers just open-sourced their Tumblr theme development framework on Github. It's called Pangolin, and it's our way of giving back to the web development community.

If you're a Tumblr theme developer or just want the story behind Pangolin, drop by our dev blog to see what they have to say about the release. Everyone in the office can agree it has made our lives easier and our development process much more solid.

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We're looking for a QA and customer support team member

Pixel Union is looking for a QA/Support generalist to join our team in Victoria or Vancouver, BC. We’re a small team dedicated to refining the experience of prefabricated design on the web. We’re looking for core members that want to help customers bring their vision to reality.

What we’re looking for:

You need to love what you do and be excited to keep up-to-date with the latest and greatest techniques.

The ideal candidate has at least a year of hands-on experience in software testing or technical support coupled with a solid knack for problem solving.

You have at least an entry-level knowledge of HTML and CSS, and are familiar with the platforms that we work on (Wordpress, Shopify, Tumblr, Ghost) or have worked with other web-based products.

You aren’t afraid of getting into the code to troubleshoot issues and you have an eye for design details.

Strong communication and problem solving skills.

We prefer people who also have experience outside of technology so you can bring perspective to your work; an understanding of how real people use technology.

What you’ll be doing:

Collaborating closely with other QA/Support team members, developers and designers to build or enhance themes ensuring that our products are of the highest quality.

Communicating first hand with our customers. The workload jumps from sales, to problem solving, to design advice.

Managing and refining our back catalogue—squashing bugs, suggesting features, making the user experience better.

Creating tools to make everyone’s job easier. Including your own.

What we offer:

Exciting work. Tesla Motors, MoMA, and Snoop Dogg (Snoop Lion?) all use our themes. You’ll be working on products that people know and love.

Flexible work. We don’t want you to get burnt out or bored. We’re happy to shuffle you around production lines every now and then to mix things up.

Flexible work hours. We all meet at the office between 2 and 4pm but otherwise, you set your own work hours. It’s all about maintaining quality and knocking off deadlines.

Unlimited vacation time. We want you to be doing the best work of your life. That means managing burnout and taking some time to develop yourself culturally.

Send us:

A brief introduction, a resume, and work samples to people@pixelunion.net.

[pixelunion-staff]

Art We Like | Marne Grahlman

It’s mid-March, and if your winter was like most then you’ve probably accumulated some serious emotional exhaustion. Marne Grahlman’s recent illustration not only explores these universal discomforts by rendering them in creative, hallucinatory depth, but does so in ways that further illuminate the physical sensations themselves.

“You Know That Feeling” was Grahlman’s senior thesis at Toronto’s OCAD, and ties together a handful of complex psychosomatic states that are otherwise overdetermined by their phrasing. “Lump in Throat,” for instance, displays Grahlman’s trademark confluence of expressive human form and interpretive novelty. Or as Grahlman phrases it, her illustration “explores metaphors in a surreal environment using characters that are both awkward and comely.”

Thus while the phrase “lump in throat” immediately calls to mind exactly, literally that, Grahlman’s exploration infuses a richer, more visceral range of tone and symbolism. Her subjects’ “awkward and comely” appearances only add to their accessibility, making each piece’s central metaphor(s) intensely potent and evocative.      

Check out Marne’s main site for more.

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Art We Like | Alejandro Tejada’s City Gazes

Street photography is usually typified by simplicity. It almost always maintains a strong sense of raw documentary and a lack of premeditation. As a result, street series often read like stills from an endless third-person narrative, and hide traces of their composition.

Alejandro Tejada’s work in the genre greatly exceeds these basic parameters. City Gazes complicates and playfully muddies this aforementioned minimalist foundation, as well as the viewer’s perspective. This is sometimes achieved through glints of construction, sometimes Tejada’s reflection or shadow, and in other instances through grandiose scale and framing.

But Tejada’s work employs another tactic, one that indicates a talent for not just seeing his subjects but tracking them, arriving at the perfect moment of image-capture. In the top image above for instance, there’s a distinct sense of heightened reality and synchronicity, adding to the scene’s surreally rich colors and textures. It’s work that elevates and expands its genre, creating and reflecting worlds within worlds and thus providing the viewer with a nearly endless well of fascination.

Check out Alejandro on Instagram, and grab our Aperture theme for $49.

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Meet Grid, our newest Shopify theme

Today we're launching Grid. Grid takes the effort out of telling customers what's happening at your store. Its masonry features bring a sense of play to your storefront's layout and makes it easy to update your store with seasonal sales, new products, or whatever you want to highlight.

It's perfect for storeowners with lots to say, and it includes four presets that show you how Grid can drastically change the look and feel of your store. Check out Minimal, Bright, Warm, and Moody.

Buy Grid from Pixel Union or from the Shopify Theme Store today for $180.

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Jitensha 4.0

Jitensha has been around for a while now. It's a Shopify theme that's named after the Japanese word for bicycle. We called it that at first because it got your online store where it needed to be while keeping pretty lightweight and easy to use. Now we call it that because it's resilient and timeless. Jitensha 4.0 adds a brand new, beautiful reponsive view for mobile customers and waaay nicer sharing icons for product pages and blog posts. If you've got a minute you should check out our lovely new demo store.

[pixelunion-staff]

We’re looking for a Marketing Manager

Pixel Union is looking for a Marketing Manager to join our team in Victoria, BC. You will report to the Creative Director and will oversee all of Pixel Union’s marketing efforts with the goal of better understanding our customers and engaging them directly through comprehensive online campaigns.

Who you are

You’re a people person with excellent interpersonal skills.

You’re confident with data analytics and setting up SEO, SEM, content marketing and drip campaigns.

You have at least two years of web marketing experience.

You have proven success in creating and delivering integrated marketing campaigns.

You have exceptional copywriting and editorial skills.

You have experience in partner/reseller enablement.

You’re organized and manage deadlines like a pro in a fast-paced environment.

What you’ll do

Be the market expert. Who are our customers? How do they buy? What are their buying criteria?

Dive into site statistics to develop a content strategy focused on SEO and a strong sales funnel.

Head up current marketing initiatives and continually identify new advertising opportunities.

Develop positioning, core messaging, and related materials for products and features across major channels including website, paid media, social, and customer support.

Collaborate with product launch teams to ensure marketing and product goals are aligned.

Be a part of our creative process by bringing a data-driven perspective.

Develop and monitor multiple initiatives simultaneously.

Weigh in on creative processes based on past experience and current data.

Who we are

Pixel Union is a growing team dedicated to helping individuals and businesses engage with their audiences across the web. With a focus on e-commerce, both through platform theme development and custom services, we specialize in finding the perfect balance between form and function for our clients. Since 2009, millions of individuals and organizations—including MoMA, Newsweek, Tesla, Yale, and The White House—have used our products to share their ideas, grow their businesses, and make the web a better place.

Send us

A brief introduction to people@pixelunion.net without any jargon or cover letter awkwardness.

Resume and work samples (if available).

While we thank you in advance for your interest and application, please note that we will only be responding to candidates selected for further consideration.

[pixelunion-staff]

Art We Like | Cosmin Nicolae

Cosmin Nicolae's photography appears positioned at one of our very favorite thresholds—the passage of a place from human to something beyond. Throughout his small but growing body of work, Nicolae's images show the traces of human construction and habitation in transit, diaphanously hanging in the air like the fog omnipresent in his semi-rural landscapes. Well, except that the fog doesn't appear to be going anywhere anytime soon.

Unlike similar projects focusing on American cities like Detroit, Nicolae's work isn't merely "ruin porn." Instead, its narrative runs much more subtly, not spotlighting urban failure so much as urban success' surreal and garbage-flecked obverse.

It's photography that traffics in suggestion without offering concrete guidance, knotting the spectacle of rejectamenta with not-so-subtle implications about human finitude. That pang of loss stimulated by Nicolae's work is founded in the perception of time—time as a force superior to humanity, both the guarantor and eventual destroyer of meaning. Nevertheless, by recognizing and elevating that dynamic of melancholic finitude, Nicolae's work is deeply, jarringly beautiful.

Cosmin uses our Expo theme.

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Art We Like | Sara Zin's Starving Artist Cookblog

Zin's gorgeously illustrated Starving Artist project could easily succeed with just two of its three sturdy legs. Food illustration is itself quite a challenging task, a well-worn path that requires a heavy dose of originality and skill to pull off.

The Starving Artist not only nails this visual challenge, but also adds spirited and highly detailed recipes that are just as sophisticated and polished as their stunning depictions. Zin's cookblog is itself a kind of layered masterpiece, a construction befitting and blending each of its beautiful strata.

Check out Sara's main site, and grab our Expo theme for $49.

[pixelunion-staff]

Art We Like | Vikki Chu

Naturalism permits an illustrator a sometimes astounding degree of saturation. In Vikki Chu's work, this license to layer is bright, warm, and incredibly playful. Whether foliage, faunae, or the occasional cityscape, Chu's pieces offer dense but entirely accessible scenes involving a wide and sometimes exotic array of subjects.

Like fellow frame-filler Llew Mejia, Chu packs her animal subjects in a thick thatchwork of patterned environments. This not only blankets the viewer, but often invokes that delightful feeling of being small—that sense of being towered-over by the sheer immensity of non-human life. That wonderment, a long-running theme in biological illustration, is made especially inviting by Chu's aforementioned threads of play and chromatic ingenuity.

Check out Vikki's main site, Instagram, and shop for more.

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Blogs We Like | Emi Fernández

Emi Fernández's photography appears aligned to a simple but undervalued drive: geting lost. Veering. Letting the frenetic orbit of a city push you outward, flinging you somewhere unplanned and, hopefully, unexpected. It's a well-established photographic impulse but it works, and Fernández's photography is a prime example of the faces, textures, and tones present just a bit outside a place's major arteries.

Fernandez's work is infused with wanderlust, and delicately balanced between B&W classicism and playful formalism. They're images that relay a sense of presence and enjoyment in each location, an enthusiastic engagement and appreciation of the many spaces and faces to which her lens turns.

[pixelunion-staff]

Our newest WordPress theme, Bindery

We've been working on Bindery (and the perfect demo for it) for what feels like forever. And now it's finally out. Bindery is a responsive grid theme for WordPress that feels like a magazine. Especially for portfolios and blogs that define themselves with images but still live for publication-quality typography. We're selling it on our store for $59.

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Blogs We Like | Theresa O'Reilly

Theresa O'Reilly's work is yet another example of the positive results that come from expertise in both design and illustration. Among her many obvious strengths, O'Reilly packs a tremendous amount of content and character into each piece without tipping into noisiness or confusion. This accessible density is made even warmer and more buoyant by O'Reilly's dazzling, near-cartoonish coloring.

With interests as varied as "rock candy, space travel, iron and other metals, maps, gems, wizards, and caves," it's no wonder O'Reilly's work spans a range of tones and topics, including the ever-present Tumblr faves Dune and The X Files. But whether it's Dana Scully or the Bene Gesserit, O'Reilly's illustrations evoke a distinct boldness, both aesthetically and tonally. That boldness, that unmissable backbone and humanity (or raccoon-ity), is what unites the myriad elements, colors, and inter-narratives into a stunning and engaging whole.

Check out Theresa's main site, Facebook, and Instagram for more.