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Design Director

Position: Full-time
Salary: £75k-£80k DOE
Location: London
Ref: LYJ-014

This boutique London agency is on the lookout for an awesome Design Director.

As one of the leaders of their agency, developing and fostering a strong and effective team culture is essential and the new Design Director will help them build it.

 

KEY RESPONSIBILITIES

Creative Leadershipp & Execution

  • Oversee and elevate the agency’s design work, ensuring it aligns with both strategic objectives and brand ambitions.
  • Lead brand identity and design development as well as bring your design and aesthetic skills to support the creative directors and creative teams on campaigns, content, and communications.
  • Lead the development of your relationship with the ECD, showing your work iteratively and seeking opinion and feedback at regular intervals. You need to be a self-starter in managing this relationship and actively engaging.
  • Seek out to understand movements and shifts in culture, bring these insights and inspirations to your creative product and explain how your creativity is connecting with current culture.
  • Push creative boundaries while maintaining brand integrity and meeting client and agency business objectives.
  • Lead by example in areas of craft, always ensuring design, photography, illustration, animation and typography are of the highest level.
 

Client Partnership Strategy

  • Act as a key creative partner for clients, building strong relationships and ensuring our work delivers measurable impact.
  • Lead pitches, workshops, and presentations to inspire and guide clients through the creative process.
  • Work collaboratively with strategy, art directors, writers and account teams to ensure creative ideas are insight-driven and commercially effective.
  • Work in partnership with the account teams to contribute to key account plans, identify growth opportunities and proactive thinking.

 

New Business Growth

  • Play an active role in the agency’s growth by identifying new creative opportunities, supporting pitches, and developing compelling proposals.
  • Collaborate with the ECD to enhance the agency’s reputation as a leader in brand and communications.
  • Proactively explore industry trends and emerging creative opportunities to keep our work fresh and forward-thinking.
  • Craft our thought leadership activities and influence how our agency brand is showing up in the world in order to increase brand awareness.


Culture & Team Development 

  • Foster a creative, inclusive, and collaborative agency culture that inspires and empowers the team.
  • Mentor and develop the designers, ensuring they have the support and guidance needed to grow.
  • Champion diversity of thought, fresh perspectives, and innovation within the agency.

 

Success in This Role Look Like

  • Delivering outstanding creative work that meets and exceeds agency and client expectations.
  • Taking responsibility as creative leader on projects and accounts, managing the creative work of our in-house staff, identifying other resources we need and helping us find them.
  • Strengthening client relationships through strategic creative leadership.
  • Helping win new business and contribute to the agency’s growth.
  • Elevating the agency’s creative culture and mentoring the team to do their best work.

 

Key attributes

  • Passionate about their craft
  • Collaborative
  • Problem solvers
  • Positive– Ambitious leaders
  • Not afraid to stand up for their work…but also humble enough to listen to others
  • Curious, really curious.


DESIGN DIRECTOR SPECIFICS

Creative leadership

  • Define and uphold agency’s design and visual output and ensure consistency across all comms.
  • Partner with Creative Director (art) to ensure alignment with art direction and design for first class output.
  • Where relevant partner with the Creative Director (copy) to bring brand ideas to life.
  • Supporting designers – mentorship, training, career development.

 

Overseeing production 

  • To oversee relevant aspects of campaign and creative production, managing third party and internal resource to ensure quality, timely and cost-effective delivery.

 

DAY-TO-DAY

Resource

  • partner ECD and CD’s in resource planning and ensuring the creative department meets all timings and deliverables, whilst maintaining quality standards.
  • be responsible for freelancers and new hires.

Efficiency – Build a ‘library’ of reusable frameworks, templates, resources – be more efficient.

Forward thinking – What else can we do that’s useful/wanted for clients eg point of view on AI.

Your leadership is instrumental in shaping the future of their agency. They’re excited to see how you continue to push creative boundaries and drive success for their clients and team. 

If you’re that Design Director looking to play a very important part in a smaller agency, and you’re happy earning between £75-£80k (DOE), please email me at tony@loveyourjob.life

 

As a creative, your portfolio is of utmost importance, so please make sure you send me a working link to your website or a PDF of your work. If you don’t, you won’t be considered for the role.