Volunteer UX/UI & Visual Design Specialist – Parenting & Family Experience

Organization: Center for Canine Behavior Studies, Inc. Initiative: Be BiteSmart℠

The Center for Canine Behavior Studies is seeking an experienced volunteer UX/UI and visual design specialist to help create a distinctive new Parent's Section for Be BiteSmart℠, our pediatric dog-bite prevention initiative.

This is not a coding role. Our website developer and manager will handle implementation.

We are looking for a designer with strong graphic design skills and experience creating websites or digital experiences for parenting, maternity, pregnancy, infants, toddlers, pediatric health, early childhood, or family consumer brands.

The Project

The new Parent's Section will initially guide families from pregnancy through the preschool years, with additional age groups and developmental stages to follow. Initial topics, for example, will include:

• Preparing the family dog before a baby arrives
• Introducing a newborn
• Managing crawling and walking stages
• Preventing unsafe hugging, kissing, and face-to-face interaction
• Teaching young children to respect a dog's space

The section should have its own warm, modern, parent-focused visual identity while remaining integrated with the existing Be BiteSmart website.

A note on scope: This Parent's Section lives as a dedicated subsection of the main Be BiteSmart website, not a separate, standalone website. Technically, it will be built using its own distinct WordPress page templates — meaning the header, navigation, color palette, and overall visual feel can be fully its own, intentionally distinct from the more clinical, business-facing look of the main site. Think of this less as "designing a few more pages" and more as designing a self-contained parent experience that happens to share a domain and backend with the main organization. Your design work will be scoped entirely to this section; the existing main site's design is not part of this role.

It should feel at home within the parenting, maternity, infant, baby, and young-child marketplace—not like a traditional veterinary or dog-training website.

The finished design must also be polished and credible enough to appeal to companies serving families with infants and young children as potential corporate sponsors and partners, without making the site feel commercial.

The Volunteer Will Help Develop

• The visual identity of the Parent's Section
• Parent-centered navigation and user journeys
• Mobile-first page layouts and wireframes
• Typography, color, imagery, illustration, spacing, and visual hierarchy
• A consistent design system for videos, guides, downloads, and future content
• Appropriate ways to acknowledge sponsors and partners
• Clear design specifications for implementation by our web developer
• Design specifications scoped specifically to the Parent's Section and its subpages) — the main Be BiteSmart site's existing design and content are outside the scope of this role

We Are Looking for Someone Who

• Has exceptional visual and graphic design ability
• Understands UX/UI, information architecture, and responsive design
• Understands how expecting parents and caregivers use digital information
• Is familiar with the visual language of parenting and family consumer brands
• Can collaborate effectively with an existing web developer
• Can explain and support design decisions clearly
• Is comfortable designing to be handed off as specifications (mockups, style guides, component references) for a developer to implement — you won't need to touch WordPress or write code yourself

Coding experience is not required.

Portfolio Required

Applicants should provide:

• A portfolio of website, UX/UI, and visual design work
• Links to three to six websites or digital experiences they designed
• A brief explanation of their role in each project
• Examples involving parents, children, healthcare, education, nonprofits, or consumer brands, when available

We would also welcome links to two or three parenting or family-oriented websites the applicant admires, with a short explanation of why.

Collaboration

The volunteer will work directly with:

Janet Spellman Website Developer and Manager

Chris P. Janelli Executive Chairman Center for Canine Behavior Studies, Inc.

About Be BiteSmart

Be BiteSmart helps parents and children create safer relationships between young children and family dogs through adult guidance, preparation, supervision, and education.