Design Director in London

Dentsu Creative is a global creative agency network built to unlock exponential growth for clients through Transformative Creativity — a unifying force that drives innovation across people, businesses, and society. Launched in June 2022, it operates in over 145 countries and is fully integrated with dentsu’s Media and CXM capabilities to deliver seamless, end-to-end solutions worldwide. Guided by the philosophy of “Building Brands for What’s Next,” Dentsu Creative empowers brands to navigate current challenges and prepare for future opportunities, crafting resilient, forward-thinking strategies that thrive in an ever-evolving world.

Purpose of the Role

Leads and delivers design excellence within the agency squad, ensuring creative ideas are realised through high-quality, hands-on execution that is on-brand, scalable and approval-ready. AI tools are a core part of how this role works: embedded into daily design workflows, used to accelerate and elevate the quality of the work and continually explored for what they can make possible.

Design output for this squad must serve two audiences with distinct visual expectations. Business professional communications demand clarity, confidence and credibility: design that signals trustworthiness and competence. Consumer-facing work demands energy, accessibility and appeal: design that makes Adobe feel exciting and approachable. The Design Director must be comfortable navigating both registers and ensuring the craft is right for each.

Primary focus on Adobe Acrobat, Adobe Express and related productivity and accessibility-led products within the Adobe portfolio.

What you’ll do

Key Partnerships

Adobe Studio Associate Creative Director: The Design Director's closest craft relationship on the Adobe side. This is a working partnership built around shared ownership of design quality, not a sign-off process. The Design Director and their Adobe counterpart should be in regular, detailed dialogue about the visual standard of the work: aligning on design system application, collaborating on the development of master assets and holding each other to the highest craft bar. The goal is a relationship close enough that both parties can challenge, push and elevate the work together, rather than simply reviewing outputs at defined gates.

Owns

• Design leadership and craft excellence across all squad outputs

• Application and stewardship of Adobe brand systems, guidelines and templates

• Development of master files and modular design approaches to enable scale

• Consistency, accessibility and production readiness across all design deliverables

• Accountability for the quality of design work leaving the squad

• Active development of designers within the squad, with genuine investment in their growth and progression

• Embedding AI-native design practice across the squad: ensuring AI tools are part of everyday workflow, not an occasional addition, and actively exploring how to push what the technology can produce

Key Moments

• Working hands-on with designers to create, refine and elevate the design output

• Translating creative ideas into high-quality, scalable design executions

• Leading agency-side design reviews and driving quality control within the squad

• Ensuring master assets and templates are fit for multi-market use

• Final design readiness prior to client review and sign-off, escalating issues where

What you’ll bring

The strongest candidate will bring a dual design sensibility: the precision and restraint for professional communications and the vitality for consumer-facing creative. They understand that for business audiences, design is a trust signal. For consumer audiences, it is an invitation. They approach AI with the same rigour they bring to any craft tool: always asking what it can do that they have not tried yet, and always ensuring the output meets the standard the work demands.

• A strong command of design across B2B and B2C contexts: understanding how visual language, tone and hierarchy shift when speaking to someone evaluating a business solution versus someone inspired to create something new

• The ability to produce design that feels appropriately professional and credible for business audiences, whilst being genuinely vibrant and engaging in consumer contexts

• Meticulous craft standards: this work appears publicly and must hold up against competitive benchmarks in both sectors

• Art direction capability: the ability to define and maintain the visual tone of a body of work, including image selection, compositional approach and the visual language that carries an idea from concept to execution. Not all designers bring this skill; this role requires it explicitly

• An AI-native approach to design: AI tools are embedded into how this person works every day. They use them to develop ideas, explore visual directions, accelerate production and push the quality of the output. This is not about occasional experimentation; it is about having already built AI into the core of a design practice and continuing to explore what the technology can do. A portfolio with significant AI integration is expected

• International fluency: experience designing for audiences across different cultures and markets, with an understanding of how visual language and messaging must adapt beyond a UK or single-market context

• A modular, scalable design approach that works across formats, markets and channels without losing quality or coherence

What we offer

This is a permanent role. The team is based from our London office on a hybrid working basis.