Art Director

This is a senior design craft leadership role within a growing home lifestyle and furniture brand with 15 stores and a strong online customer base. The Art Director is responsible for the visual quality and technical execution of everything the brand produces — from campaign assets and paid social creative to product photography, the design system and store communications. The Art Director is the person who takes creative vision and delivers it at the highest standard through a skilled design team. This is a role rooted in design craft: the right person will have started their career as a designer and that foundation will inform everything about how they lead, brief and quality-control the team's output. The Art Director owns the brand's visual design system and takes progressive ownership of shoot creative direction. It reports directly to the Creative Director and is their closest executional partner.

Key Responsibilities

• Own, maintain and evolve the brand's visual design system — typography, colour, layout principles, iconography and image treatment — ensuring consistency across every touchpoint.
• Act as the final design quality check on all visual output before it goes to market, holding the team to a high and consistent standard.
• Maintain and develop brand design guidelines, master templates and asset libraries used across the business.
• Bring a trained design eye to every output — from a paid social frame to a store POS panel — ensuring craft quality is never compromised by pace.
• Stay current with design, motion and visual trends relevant to the lifestyle and home sector, sharing relevant inspiration with the team.
• Oversee the production of all creative assets — campaign collateral, paid social formats, web visuals, email, brochures, store POS and studio product photography.
• Manage design team workloads, briefs and delivery schedules, ensuring output is on time, on brief and to the standard the brand demands.
• Coach and develop each team member individually, providing regular craft feedback and supporting their technical growth.
• Identify skills gaps and work with the Creative Director to address them through training, freelance support or future recruitment.
• Champion rigorous design process and production standards across the team, including file management, naming conventions and handover quality.
• Take progressive ownership of shoot creative direction — scamps, mood boards, location review and on-set art direction — transitioning from the Creative Director over the first six months in role.
• Bring a design-led perspective to every shoot: ensuring framing, composition, colour palette and styling choices are rooted in the brand's visual language.
• Work closely with the Production Manager on shoot logistics, scheduling and freelance photographer and videographer relationships.
• Brief and direct the Studio Stylist on all product photography for the website, ensuring consistency and quality across all NPD and studio output.
• Review all shoot output before it is signed off and distributed, applying a trained design eye to every image.
• Work proficiently across the Adobe Creative Cloud suite — InDesign, Illustrator and Photoshop are core requirements; After Effects and Premiere Pro are a strong advantage.
• Ensure the design team is working to consistent technical standards across all Adobe tools, with templates and master files properly maintained.
• Champion the use of Adobe Firefly and other AI design tools within the team for concepting, mood-boarding and production acceleration.
• Work with the Creative Content Editor to embed AI-assisted production workflows that increase output volume without compromising visual quality.
• Collaborate with the Content & Campaign Manager to ensure all creative briefs are well-formed, visually ambitious and structured for efficient design production.
• Collaborate with the Digital Director's team to understand channel-specific visual requirements — ensuring assets are technically and aesthetically fit for purpose across all digital platforms.
• Provide design production support and visual quality assurance for digital output & the website.
• Represent the Creative team in cross-functional meetings where design output, visual standards or asset delivery are under discussion.

About You

Essential experience & background

• A graphic design qualification or equivalent professional training — this role requires a design craft foundation, not a brand management or marketing background.
• Significant in-house brand design experience, ideally within a lifestyle, home, fashion or retail brand.
• Proven hands-on proficiency with Adobe Creative Cloud — InDesign, Illustrator and Photoshop are non-negotiable; candidates without this will not be considered.
• Demonstrated experience managing and developing a design team, with evidence of raising craft quality and team output.
• Experience overseeing multi-channel asset production — you understand the technical requirements of digital, print, social and video formats.
• Experience directing or co-directing shoots, with an understanding of how photographic and design decisions interact.

Skills & strengths

• An exceptionally strong design eye — trained, precise and uncompromising about craft quality.
• A leader who develops people through design feedback, not just management — your team gets better because of how you brief and critique their work.
• Highly organised and process-minded — you can manage a complex multi-channel production workload without quality slipping.
• Technically fluent — you understand how files are built, how assets are prepared and what good production practice looks like.
• Commercially aware — you understand that great design has to perform, not just look beautiful.
• Confident communicating design decisions to non-designers — you can explain why something works or doesn't in terms stakeholders understand.
• Genuinely curious about AI design tools and their potential to accelerate production without diluting craft.