Corporate Designer — Aesthetics Projects

$85–100/hrrate as listed

Mercor is staffing two aesthetics projects where designers score AI-generated business deliverables — decks, docs, spreadsheets, PDFs — and rework the best one until it meets reference quality. Roughly 10 hours a week, fully remote, with an unpaid ~55-minute calibration assessment in native Office files before onboarding.

Summary, eligibility guidance and screening preparation are prepared by Sidequest from the platform's posting. Check the source listing before applying.

What the work actually involves

You receive several AI-generated versions of the same corporate deliverable — a pitch deck, a client-facing memo, a model summary in Excel — and score each on layout and spacing, typography, colour, domain realism, and finish. Then you pick the strongest candidate and rebuild it to the standard a consulting firm or in-house design team would actually send to a client. The written justification matters as much as the score: reviewers expect you to point at the specific slide, cell, table or section and say what the reader loses because of it. Vague verdicts like "looks unprofessional" are not usable training signal.

Both Project Style and Project Midas run in native Office formats, so PowerPoint, Word and Excel access is a functional requirement, not a preference. You will be working inside real files — master slides, cell formatting, styles — not screenshots or exports.

What the platform screens for

Calibration, not taste. The preference-labelling half of the assessment is graded exact-match against an answer key. A 4 where the key says 3 scores the same as a 1. The point is whether your internal scale can be aligned to a shared rubric.
Evidence-bound writing. Each of the three files is graded on the justification separately from the score, so a correct number with a hand-wavy rationale still loses.
Proof you build, not just critique. The tooling section asks for 1–2 decks you personally made.
Eye for the small stuff. Unequal card heights, inconsistent gutters, orphaned lines, mismatched tick-label formats — the failure modes AI output tends to produce.

Logistics

Fully remote and asynchronous, roughly 10 hours per week, paid hourly in an observed band of $85–100/hr for project work. The screening assessment takes about 55 minutes, is untimed, has no optional questions, and is unpaid — the rate applies only after onboarding. Backgrounds that fit: management consulting, investment banking, agency or in-house corporate design, marketing and comms, or any knowledge-work role where deliverable presentation was part of the job.

What they look for

Corporate deliverable design (decks, reports, workbooks) at client-ready standard
Working access and fluency in Microsoft PowerPoint, Word and Excel
Written critique tied to specific evidence in a file
Eye for layout precision — alignment, spacing, margin discipline, typographic consistency
Background in consulting, banking, in-house design, agency or marcom
Ability to work to an external rubric rather than personal preference

Included with this listing

Interview prep — 10 questions

Matched to what this platform's screening actually measures. Answer each out loud in 60–90 seconds: claim → concrete example → implication.

What it tests: Whether you have actually produced business materials under a client standard, rather than only critiquing or commissioning them.
A strong answer: A named format and audience (a 30-slide diligence deck for an investment committee, a board memo, a monthly KPI workbook) with two or three specific design decisions and the reason behind each — grid choice, typographic hierarchy, why a chart type was rejected.
Where people lose it: Describing the project's content and outcome while skipping the design reasoning entirely, which reads as project management experience rather than design experience.