Contract Graphic Designer — Print-Quality PDF Templates

CONTRACT GRAPHIC DESIGNER — PRINT-QUALITY PDF TEMPLATES Company: LifeScribe (AI Technologies Holdings LLC) Website: trylifescribe.com Engagement: Fixed-fee contract, milestone-based Total fee: $1,500 USD Duration: 4 to 5 weeks Location: Remote, worldwide. Some overlap with US Pacific time for two short weekly check-ins. Deliverable: 14 production-ready HTML + CSS print templates, plus editable Figma source THE SHORT VERSION LifeScribe turns a spoken memory into a beautifully written chapter, then renders that chapter as a PDF our Members keep, share, and print at home. The writing is already good. The pages it lands on are not good enough. We currently generate our templates with AI-assisted design, and AI took us to a competent baseline and stopped there. We want an intermediate graphic designer with real editorial and book-layout craft to design 14 new templates across four product families, and to hand them to us as clean, print-oriented HTML and CSS our rendering service can use on day one. The bar for this job is simple. A Member opens the PDF and says "someone made this." ABOUT THE PRODUCT LifeScribe is a voice-first digital storytelling platform. A Member records themselves talking about a memory. We transcribe it, transform it into a literary-quality Chapter, and compile Chapters into a Life Book. Two things about our audience shape every design decision: - Our primary Members are 65 to 85 years old. They read on paper and on tablets, often with reading glasses, and they frequently print at home on an inkjet. - Our secondary buyers are their adult children, 45 to 60, who purchase LifeScribe as a gift and who judge the product almost entirely by how the finished PDF looks when it arrives. The PDF is the product's most-shared artifact. It gets emailed to siblings, printed for a birthday, and put in a binder. It has to hold up. Brand vocabulary, please use it in your proposal: Members (not users), Chapters (not entries or posts), Life Book (not journal or album), Legacy Quest (our guided prompt system). SCOPE: 14 TEMPLATES IN FOUR FAMILIES 1) LifeScribe core. 3 templates. Each must work across all three document types our PDF service generates: a single Chapter, a compiled Life Book with front matter and a table of contents, and a Legacy Quest export. We want three genuinely distinct personalities, not three colorways of one idea. 2) Wedding Life Book. 5 templates. A separate premium product. Wedding guests each contribute a written message, photos, and a voice recording, and the couple receives one compiled keepsake book. The five should span a real stylistic range: classic and formal, modern and editorial, romantic, minimal, and one with a distinctive point of view of your own. 3) Recipe. 3 templates. Family recipe books compiled from scanned handwritten recipe cards. Layouts must handle a photograph of the original handwritten card sitting alongside the transcribed text. Ingredient lists, method steps, yield and time metadata, and headnotes. 4) Journal. 3 templates. Compiled journal and diary entries, often dated, often short, sometimes with a scan of the original handwritten page. Think dated entry runs, marginalia, and a strong sense of chronology. Full functional specifications, live sample content, and the exact data contract go to shortlisted candidates. Do not design speculatively before kickoff. WHAT "A STEP ABOVE AI" ACTUALLY MEANS HERE This is the most important section, so we are being specific. AI-assisted layout reliably produces a centered title, a rule, body text at a safe measure, an evenly spaced photo grid, and a page number bottom center. Correct, competent, forgettable. We are paying for the layer above that. We expect to see evidence of: Typographic craft - A real type system, not just a heading font and a body font. Established scale, considered leading, deliberate measure of roughly 60 to 75 characters, tuned tracking at display sizes. - Optical rather than metric alignment on drop caps, quotation marks, and hanging punctuation. - Genuine small caps and oldstyle figures where the family supports them. Not faux small caps made by shrinking capitals. - Ligature and kerning attention in titles. - Baseline rhythm that survives an image insertion. Editorial structure - Front matter that feels like a book: a title page, a dedication or epigraph slot, a table of contents for compiled Life Books. - Running heads and folios that carry information, whether that is chapter title verso and book title recto or your own defensible system. - Section openers, chapter breaks, and end-of-chapter marks that are designed rather than defaulted. - A colophon or closing page. That is the page our Members photograph and post. Ornament and identity - Custom rules, dividers, corner treatments, or chapter marks drawn by you. Not stock icon-library glyphs, not clip art, not generic flourishes. - Each template needs a recognizable personality a Member could describe in words: "the letterpress one," "the modern one," "the album one." Photo handling with intent - Considered caption typography, frame or shadow treatment or the deliberate absence of one, consistent gutters. - Layouts that adapt gracefully to a mixed set of portrait, landscape, and square scans instead of letterboxing everything into the same rectangle. - A meaningful difference between a photograph as hero and a photograph as supporting evidence. Practical print sense - Ink economy. Our Members print at home on inkjets. Full-bleed dark backgrounds are expensive, bleed unevenly on plain paper, and read as amateurish. Design for paper, not for screenshots. - Contrast that survives a mid-quality home printer. No light gray body text. - Margins that survive a three-hole punch and a binder clip. If your portfolio is primarily social graphics, UI screens, or logo work, this is not the right fit. We are looking for book, magazine, annual report, editorial, cookbook, or fine-stationery experience. TECHNICAL DELIVERY SPECIFICATION (MANDATORY) This is a hard requirement, not a preference. Read it before applying. Templates must be delivered as production-ready HTML + CSS with Handlebars placeholders, for example a chapterTitle variable and an each block over photos, rendered via headless Chrome to PDF. Not as flattened PDFs, not as InDesign files, not as Figma-only handoffs. All CSS must be print-oriented: - @page sizing and margins, with named page rules where the first page differs - Page-break control using break-before, break-after, and break-inside avoid - Orphan and widow handling - box-decoration-break handled where borders or backgrounds cross a page break All templates must be fully self-contained: - Embedded @font-face with fonts supplied as local woff2 or base64 assets. No Google Fonts links, no CDN, no external requests of any kind. The renderer runs without network access. - No external JavaScript. Layout must not depend on JS. Any inline script must be optional and the layout must be correct without it. - All ornaments as inline SVG or embedded assets. The editable Figma source must accompany every template, organized, named, with type and color defined as reusable styles. Render environment to design against: - Renderer: headless Chromium via Playwright or Puppeteer - Wait condition: networkidle - Media emulation: print - printBackground true, preferCSSPageSize true, all margins zero and controlled by @page - sRGB only. Chromium does not emit CMYK or spot colors. Page geometry: - Primary trim is US Letter, 8.5 by 11 inches. This is the home-printing default. - Every template must also render correctly at 8 by 10 inches by changing a single @page size declaration and nothing else. Build in relative units so this holds. - No bleed required for this release. If you want to support future print-on-demand, expose bleed as a commented-out variable rather than baking it in. Data contract: the authoritative Handlebars variable list is issued at kickoff. Expect fields covering member name, book title, chapter number, chapter title, optional subtitle, date, pre-rendered body HTML, style name, a photos array with url, caption, and orientation, and an optional audio-playback QR URL. Every optional field must degrade cleanly. A missing subtitle must not leave a gap. A missing caption must not leave an empty caption rule. EDGE-CASE ACCEPTANCE MATRIX Every template must render correctly across all of the following. We test all of them before accepting a milestone. Ship a rendered PDF proof for each case with each template. - Very short title, one word, must not look lost on the page - Very long title, 120 characters or more, must wrap and rebalance without colliding with ornament or folio - Zero photos, a text-only chapter must be a designed outcome rather than a broken grid - One photo, should feel intentional rather than like a grid missing eleven siblings - Two to five photos, the common case - Twelve or more photos, must flow to additional pages with a coherent system - A 200-word chapter, must not leave three quarters of a page empty and unresolved - A 4,000-word chapter, must paginate cleanly with correct running heads and folios and no orphans or widows - Portrait scan, a tall handwritten page or recipe card - Landscape scan, a wide photograph - Square scan, cropped or social-sourced - Mixed orientations in a single chapter, all three together, still coherent - A long unbroken string, an email address or URL in the body must not break the measure - Non-ASCII characters, accented names must render from the embedded font rather than falling back - The 8 by 10 inch re-render, single @page change, layout still correct BRAND SYSTEM You have room to interpret, but these are the fixed points. Colors: - Deep Teal 1A5F7A, brand identity elements - Warm Gold D4AC0D, accent, highlights, premium marks - Soft Cream F9F3E9, page and panel backgrounds - Rich Burgundy 7D1935, emphasis and special features - Forest Green 146152, growth and legacy elements - Ink Black 1A1A1A, primary headline color Type: - Headings, Playfair Display, SIL OFL - Body, Source Sans 3, SIL OFL - Buttons, labels, small caps, Montserrat, SIL OFL You may propose one additional display or text family per template family if it materially raises the quality. It must be SIL OFL, Apache 2.0, or a license you transfer to us in writing that permits embedding in distributed PDFs and in server-side rendering. No fonts requiring per-seat or per-render licensing. Font licensing documentation is a delivery requirement. Accessibility floor for print, non-negotiable: - Body text minimum 11 pt at US Letter trim, 11.5 to 12 pt preferred - Leading 1.4 to 1.6 of the type size on body copy - Near-black body text on light backgrounds, no gray lighter than 3A3A3A for running text - No all caps for anything longer than a short label - No text over a photograph unless there is a solid or heavily scrimmed panel behind it - Semantic HTML using h1, h2, p, figure, and figcaption so the PDF stays text-selectable and searchable DELIVERABLES PER TEMPLATE 1) The Handlebars template file, commented and formatted 2) The CSS, or an embedded style block if you prefer a single file, print-oriented and variable-driven 3) A fonts folder with licensed woff2 files and a license file per family 4) An assets folder with inline or embedded SVG ornaments, source included 5) Fifteen rendered PDF proofs, one per row of the edge-case matrix 6) The Figma source, organized, with named type styles, color styles, and components 7) A one-page README covering the design rationale, the type scale, which CSS variables are safe for us to change, and any known limitations FEE AND MILESTONES Total: $1,500 USD, fixed. Paid on milestone acceptance. Every milestone requires the edge-case proofs before it is considered delivered. M1, $200. Kickoff, brief review, and three static design directions for one flagship LifeScribe chapter template, in Figma plus PDF preview. We select one direction. M2, $300. Go or no-go gate. The selected direction built as a complete HTML, CSS, and Handlebars template passing the full edge-case matrix. If M2 does not clear, the engagement ends there and M1 plus M2 are paid in full. M3, $200. The remaining two LifeScribe core templates, built and proofed. M4, $450. The five Wedding Life Book templates, built and proofed. M5, $350. The three Recipe and three Journal templates, built and proofed, plus the final QA pack and handoff. We are transparent about what this budget is. It is a real, fully funded first engagement at a modest fixed fee, and it exists to find someone we can keep working with. Designers who clear M2 well are our first call for the ongoing template roadmap, seasonal editions, the Legacy Quest export refresh, and our upcoming scanning product's output surfaces. If you are the right person, this is the smallest project we will ever hire you for. TIMELINE Week 1: Kickoff, brief, data contract handoff. M1 concepts delivered. Week 2: Direction selected. M2 flagship template built and proofed. Week 3: M3 delivered. M4 in progress. Week 4: M4 delivered. M5 in progress. Week 5: M5 delivered. Final QA, revisions, handoff. Two 30-minute check-ins per week with the CEO. Async the rest of the time. One round of revisions per milestone, with a second round included on M2 only, since M2 sets the pattern for everything after it. ARE YOU A DESIGNER BUT NOT A PRINT-CSS DEVELOPER? Tell us in your application. We would rather see exceptional design work paired with our own developer than settle for average design that happens to arrive with clean HTML. Track A, preferred: you design and you build. Full scope, full fee. Track B: you design in Figma to a specification we agree at kickoff, and our development partner implements. Reduced scope, adjusted fee, and the design bar goes up because that is all we are buying. Say which track you are applying for. Applying for Track B is not a mark against you. WHAT WILL GET YOU DECLINED IMMEDIATELY - A portfolio that is entirely social media graphics, UI screens, or logos - AI-generated layouts submitted as your own design work - Purchased or marketplace templates presented as portfolio pieces - Figma-only or flattened-PDF delivery when applying for Track A - Any application that does not answer both questions below - Generic, clearly templated cover letters HOW TO APPLY Send the following 1) Portfolio link. Point us to your two or three strongest editorial, book, cookbook, magazine, or fine-stationery pieces specifically. Do not make us hunt. 2) Track A or Track B. 3) If Track A, a link to one HTML and CSS piece you built that was designed to be printed, plus the PDF it produces. A personal project is fine. 4) Answer this in five sentences or fewer. A single template has to hold a 200-word chapter with 12 photos, and a 4,000-word chapter with 1 photo. Describe the layout system you would use so that both feel deliberately designed rather than one being an accident of the other. 5) Answer this in two sentences. Visit trylifescribe.com. Name one typographic or layout decision on that site you would change, and why. 6) Confirm you have read the technical delivery specification and can deliver against it. 7) Confirm your availability across the five-week window. Question 5 exists because we want to know you actually looked. Applications that skip it are not read. TERMS - Work for hire. All deliverables, source files, and derivative rights assign to AI Technologies Holdings LLC on final payment. - Mutual NDA signed before the data contract and sample Member content are shared. Sample content is real Member writing, appropriately anonymized, and is confidential. - Templates may not be resold, redistributed, or published to template marketplaces. - You may show the work in your portfolio after our public launch of the templates, with our written confirmation of the date. - Font licenses must be documented and must permit PDF embedding and server-side rendering. Any font we cannot license cleanly gets replaced at your cost. LifeScribe is an equal opportunity engagement. We evaluate on portfolio and craft.