Design Director

Reporting to the Creative Director, our client is a B2B Creative Agency with a 100-strong global team working for clients in media, commercial property, legal, asset management, financial, health and advisory. They are passionate about building brands, growing brands, and delivering immersive digital experiences that leave a lasting impact.

As a Design Director, you are the cornerstone of the agency’s creative output, working on the most creative and challenging client jobs. You will be working across all of our Studio creative teams, nurturing and developing their creative output, ensuring the best delivery for innovative solutions for their clients and the agency. Working with a defined set of clients or projects, you will have multiple focuses, clients and projects in play, working directly with the creative leads and designers to ensure the production of ground-breaking, visually stunning briefs made to budget.

Experience:

• Creative excellence: You have an outstanding portfolio of work that showcases your expertise in developing impactful creative concepts and executions that push the boundaries, deliver memorable creative narratives and demonstrate your understanding of the clients’ challenges.
• Leadership: You are a design leader with a track record of developing and growing a collaborative team. You have managed and mentored designers at different stages of their career journey, ideally having hired, nurtured, and grown a team or department.
• Collaboration: You have proven experience in managing a variety of projects simultaneously and working positively with others across an agency to deliver seamlessly to your clients. Your career has benefitted from the empathetic relationships you have built with colleagues.

Creative responsibilities:

• Progress and innovation: You’ll constantly challenge your own and others’ creative output in pursuit of better outcomes; sharing fresh thinking, ideas, and creative expressions across the studio.
• Client relationships: You will be liaising directly with senior client teams, understanding their creative concerns and challenges ahead and supporting the client servicing team with the development of the relationship including where relevant and appropriate taking briefs.
• Client delivery: You will understand key timeframes, resources and client’s needs, challenging where needed to get the best result both for our clients.
• Growth and profitability: You will support and deliver programmes of work that deliver creative excellence on time and on budget.
• Team leadership: You will empower new thinking amongst your team and ensure that they have every opportunity to do what they do best.

Agency Responsibilities:

• Management team: As a senior member of the creative team, you will need to work closely with other key areas of the business to build and evolve processes and practices that allow creative teams to receive the support they need to deliver to clients and to grow and develop themselves. You will seek to understand any concerns, worries or red flags that need to be acted upon and propose positive solutions.
• Talent development: You will work closely with the Creative Director to nurture, nourish and develop creative talent across the agency. You will identify development needs and skill gaps to allow the team to flourish to continue to offer the best solutions to our clients. You will play a leading role in recruiting the best creative talent to support growth and development.
• Agency growth: You will support agency growth initiatives jointly overseeing publicly facing content to build our client’s brand and reputation, guiding the agency through new business pitches, introductions and follow-up meetings with potential clients.

Competencies:

• Creatively driven: You have a core belief in the power of creativity to deliver client success and agency growth and are driven always to seek excellence and innovation in your own designs.
• Creative vision: You are on your own journey of discovery, creatively exploring the world around you, ever curious and mindful of new technology innovations and best practices and how they link into solving client challenges.
• Client-centric: You are focused on understanding and meeting client needs, creating solutions to their design challenges and presenting these in a compelling manner internally and to clients.
• Communication: You have excellent communication and presentation skills, capable of engaging and influencing clients and internal teams at all levels.
• Leadership: You are an inspirational leader who nurtures, empowers and fosters ownership within team members.

Essential behaviours:

• Self-starter: You harness your creativity in practical and solution-oriented ways, balancing client needs and commercial realities with creative excellence.
• Positive: You bring a can-do attitude to the workplace and inspire the same in your team. Whether working on a challenging project or providing feedback, you maintain a constructive and optimistic approach. Your positive energy fosters a supportive environment where creativity can thrive, and your team remains motivated and engaged.
• Collaborative: You understand the importance of teamwork and the value of diverse perspectives. You collaborate closely with cross-functional teams, to ensure that design solutions align with business goals and audience needs. Your communication skills allow you to present and discuss ideas clearly, ensuring everyone is aligned and working towards the same vision.