Founding Designer

About Fort

Fort is a San Francisco-based wearables company.

We are building a premium health tracking device for people who want to keep their bodies strong and capable for life. Fort helps people understand their training, recovery, and progress in a way that feels clear, useful, and motivating.

We care about creating a product and brand that feel refined, human, and deeply useful: part health companion, part beautiful object, part new ritual for strength and longevity.

About the role

Fort is hiring a Founding Designer to define how Fort looks, feels, and communicates across product, brand, and growth.

This person will shape the visual and product experience of a premium wearable for strength and health, from the app and website to launch creative, product marketing, social, email, packaging, and community moments.

The design bar for Fort should feel closer to Oura, Apple, On, Hoka, premium jewelry, boutique wellness, and modern health brands than traditional fitness tech. We are not trying to make another dashboard-heavy tracker. We are building something that feels beautiful enough to wear every day, useful enough to change behavior, and clear enough to understand within seconds.

Why this role matters

Fort needs to become instantly understandable and desirable.

Strength is one of the most important parts of long-term health, but most fitness products still make it feel niche, manual, intimidating, or overly technical. Fort’s job is to make strength and recovery feel like a natural part of everyday health.

Design is central to that.

The right person will help make Fort feel premium, trustworthy, warm, and culturally relevant across every touchpoint: the app, the website, the product story, the social presence, the preorder funnel, the launch, and the way customers first experience the brand.

What You’ll Do

Define Fort’s visual system

• Own Fort’s design language across brand, web, app, marketing, social, email, launch, and community surfaces.
• Build a system that feels premium and sparse without becoming vague or generic.
• Create a visual identity that can scale across product UI, landing pages, paid ads, founder content, emails, investor updates, creator assets, and launch moments.
• Set standards for typography, layout, hierarchy, color, imagery, motion, and art direction.

Design product experiences

• Shape the Fort app experience across workout summaries, weekly progress, muscles trained, strength trends, recovery context, and health narratives.

• Make training data feel clear, calm, useful, and emotionally resonant.

• Help translate complex sensor data, strength tracking, and recovery signals into simple product moments people can actually understand and act on.

• Design interfaces that feel premium and intelligent, not clinical, crowded, or gamified in a cheap way.

  Shape Fort’s creative direction

• Art-direct product renders, on-wrist visuals, lifestyle scenes, animations, packaging moments, and launch creative.

• Collaborate with 3D artists, content producers, photographers, marketers, coaches, community leads, and founders.

• Help define the world Fort belongs in: premium health, modern strength, boutique wellness, longevity, design, and everyday capability.

• Make strength feel like health infrastructure, not a niche gym-bro feature.

What We’re Looking For

• 5+ years of experience in product, mobile, or brand design.

• An exceptional portfolio with strong taste, clear thinking, and polished execution.

• Experience designing for premium consumer, wellness, fitness, fashion, beauty, health, hardware, lifestyle, or hospitality brands.

• Strong product UI instincts, especially around making data, progress, and health insights feel clear and motivating.

• Ability to design growth surfaces that convert without feeling loud, cheap, or generic.

• Excellent typography, layout, hierarchy, visual storytelling, and art direction.

• A strong sense for what makes a product feel desirable, trustworthy, and premium.

• A genuine interest in health, strength, longevity, aesthetics, and consumer products.

  Location

  In-person in SF strongly preferred, would consider NY for the right candidate!