Content Designer

Apply before 11:55pm on Monday 22nd September 2025

The Intellectual Property Office (IPO) is seeking a content designer to contribute to its digital transformation. This role involves designing user-centred public services at scale within multidisciplinary teams, aligning with Government Design Principles. Our designers use plain English to make complex processes and guidance easy to understand. They help people get the information they need; in the way they need it. Key responsibilities include working as part of a user-centred design team to resolve complex challenges and promoting best practices and standards in content design. The successful candidate will be proactive, take ownership of design activities (like facilitating critiques and documenting content guidelines), and possess excellent collaboration, presentation, and communication skills to work effectively with various stakeholders.

Find out more on our Design in Government blog.

Working Style

This role will be carried out in-line with IPO Hybrid working arrangements where staff are currently expected to spend at least 20% of their time working onsite from one of our offices. This role is based in our Newport Office.

The requirement for attendance at an office location can vary by role so we would encourage candidates to discuss working arrangements with the recruiting manager to agree a reasonable balance between working from home and the office.

Main duties consist of but are not limited to:

• Write clear, informative content for our digital services.
• Make good decisions and can recognise when to ask for further guidance and support.
• Support and contribute to the IPO designer community of practice, helping to share knowledge, learning and best practice.
• Apply content design best practice and principles across products and services.
• Collaborate with interaction designers and user researchers to design digital services that are usable and accessible to all users.
• Be comfortable presenting your designs as part of a collaborative feedback process.
• Build relationships across Intellectual Property Office and government to focus on the needs of our users and to influence stakeholders.
• Use the GOV.UK Style Guide, in house IPO content style guide and GOV.UK Design System to create high-quality content.
• Play an important role in ensuring that services meet the GOV.UK Service Standard and confidently present evidence at service assessments.

Essential criteria

• Experience in writing plain English content that is accessible, usable and complies with writing styles and standards, such as the GOV.UK writing style.
• Experience of user-centred design methods and using user research insights to inform content design decisions.
• Knowledge of agile ways of working, and experience of working with user researchers, service and interaction designer and other user-centred design professions.
• Experience of working with senior stakeholders and ability to negotiate important design decisions.
• Comfortable in designing collaboratively and in the open and engaging with people in a variety of ways (for example, workshops or co-design activities).
• Can work to tight deadlines and manage their workload across several projects.

Desirable criteria:
The below criteria are desirable only. These will not be assessed throughout the recruitment process, but will be used in the event of tied scores between candidates.

• Experience or understanding of service blueprints and journey mapping diagrams.
• Experience of working with HTML and CSS prototypes, for example the GOV.UK Prototype Kit.

Benefits

Alongside your salary of £35,579, Intellectual Property Office contributes £10,307 towards you being a member of the Civil Service Defined Benefit Pension scheme. Find out what benefits a Civil Service Pension provides.

• Unlimited Pluralsight video learning access
• Access to Microsoft’s ESI training suite
• Hybrid working with no core hours
• Substantial support for career progression
• 25 days annual leave moving to 30 days in annual increments
• You will also get 8 days public leave and 1 day privilege leave

Additional details on security and vetting

Successful candidates must pass a disclosure and barring security check and if successful you must also hold, or be willing to obtain, a higher Security Clearance.

For meaningful checks to be carried out individuals will need to have lived in the UK for a sufficient period of time, depending on the level of clearance, to enable appropriate checks to be carried out and produce a result which provides the required level of assurance. For this role the successful individual will need to have consistently lived in the UK for a minimum 5 years in order to meet the relevant security clearance.