Senior Digital Designer in Milton Keynes

About Us

My 1st Years is the UK's leading personalised baby and kids gifting brand, offering high-quality, beautifully designed personalised products through eCommerce, retail, and 3rd party marketplaces. We have built a strong direct-to-consumer presence in the UK and are now expanding into premium physical retail with partners such as Harrods and Selfridges alongside growing marketplace channels such as Next. International expansion is also underway, making this a pivotal and exciting stage in our journey as we bring the My 1st Years experience to more customers around the world. With personalisation at the heart of what we do, our business thrives on exceptional customer experiences, innovation, and premium quality. Customer retention and CRM are central to achieving our growth ambitions, ensuring we maximise lifetime value and deepen relationships with every customer we serve.

Role Overview

This is a creative role that spans the full spectrum of digital content production — from motion graphics and short-form video for social and YouTube, through to static campaign design, web landing pages, email creative, and paid advertising assets. If you are equally at home directing a Reel as you are crafting a web banner or designing a typography-led social post, this role was built for you. You will sit within our wider creative team, working closely with the Creative Lead, performance marketing, CRM, brand, and studio functions. You will set the creative direction for format, motion, and typography across our digital channels — raising the bar on everything we produce and helping us build a content engine that is both beautiful and built to perform. You will also manage and quality-check output from a small offshore design team, ensuring high-volume work is delivered on-brand and on-time without compromising quality.

Core Focus

• Performance-led creative across all digital channels — designing thumb-stopping, conversion-focused assets across paid, social, email, and onsite, with a testing mindset and a data-informed approach to iteration.
• Brand craft and quality at pace — bringing a strong eye for typography, layout, and visual consistency to a high-volume DTC environment, including oversight of an offshore design team to maintain standards at scale.
• Process, tools, and AI innovation — owning creative workflows, templates, and handover processes while actively leading the team's adoption of AI-powered design tools to improve speed and output quality.

Key Responsibilities

1. Motion Graphics & Short-Form Video
   • This is a core part of the role. You will work with the brand team to finalise and edit short-form video content natively built for social and YouTube, and therefore have a good understanding of what works on each platform.
   • Create motion graphics and animated assets for use across social, email, paid advertising, and onsite.
   • Edit and post-produce video content to a high standard, including pacing, sound, captions, transitions, and platform-specific formatting.
   • Develop storyboards and creative direction documents for video briefs, ensuring clarity of format, messaging, and visual style before production begins.
   • Work with the studio and brand teams to brief and direct video shoots, providing clear guidance on format requirements, aspect ratios, and content objectives.
   • Build a library of reusable motion templates, transitions, and animated brand elements to improve production speed and consistency.
   • Stay current with trending formats, audio, and content styles on TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube, and proactively bring these insights into the creative output.
2. Creative Direction: Format & Typography
   • You will own the visual language of our digital content — setting the standard for how we use typography, format, and layout across every channel.
   • Define and evolve the typographic approach across digital channels, ensuring it is consistent, on-brand, and appropriate for each format and platform.
   • Provide creative direction on format choices — advising the team on when to use static vs. motion, landscape vs. portrait, text-led vs. image-led.
   • Develop and maintain a suite of digital format templates across social, email, paid, and web that codify best practice and enable the team to produce at pace.
   • Ensure all digital creative demonstrates strong visual hierarchy, clear messaging structure, and platform-appropriate typography treatment.
   • Push the creative standard on social content in particular — bringing an editorial, considered approach to posts that could otherwise default to generic product imagery.
3. Social Content Design
   • Social is one of our most visible channels and a key driver of brand perception and acquisition. You will take ownership of the design quality across our organic and paid social output.
   • Design and produce social content across Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, Pinterest, and YouTube — both organic and paid.
   • Create platform-native content that feels at home in each environment, not repurposed from another format.
   • Balance brand consistency with platform-specific creative requirements, adapting the visual language intelligently for each context.
   • Collaborate with the brand and social teams to bring campaign narratives to life through compelling, shareable content.
   • Design static social posts, carousels, stories, and covers with a strong eye for typography, layout, and brand personality.
   • Produce paid social creative with a performance and testing mindset — variants, hooks, and formats built for iteration.
4. Web Banners & Landing Pages
   • You will design high-quality onsite creative that converts, ensuring visual coherence from the first ad impression through to the landing page experience.
   • Design onsite banners, homepage hero creative, category headers, and promotional tiles across desktop and mobile.
   • Design and art direct landing pages for campaigns, product launches, and seasonal moments — with a clear UX and conversion-focused approach.
   • Collaborate with the web and product teams on new feature rollouts, ensuring design quality is maintained at every customer touchpoint.
   • Ensure visual continuity between off-site creative (paid, social, email) and the onsite landing experience.
5. Email & CRM Creative
   • Email is a critical revenue channel for My 1st Years. You will take ownership of design quality across our CRM programme.
   • Design and build email templates and campaign creative across promotional, lifecycle, and automated flow communications.
   • Bring a conversion-focused approach to email — hierarchy, CTA placement, product presentation, and mobile-first layout.
   • Ensure email creative is responsive, accessible, and consistent with brand guidelines.
   • Collaborate with the CRM team to support dynamic content, personalisation, and A/B testing of creative elements.
   • Incorporate motion and animated GIF elements into email where appropriate to increase engagement.
6. Performance Creative & Testing
   • You understand that great creative in a commercial environment must be measurable. You will work closely with the performance marketing team to build creative that is designed for testing and optimisation.
   • Build creative variants for A/B and multivariate testing across paid social, YouTube, and email.
   • Develop a working understanding of performance signals (CTR, view-through rate, scroll-stop, conversion) and apply these to creative decisions.
   • Proactively review performance data with the paid marketing team and iterate on creative based on results.
   • Flag creative fatigue on campaigns and propose fresh formats or angles before performance dips.
   • Ensure assets are formatted and structured for platform-specific requirements, including aspect ratios, file sizes, safe zones, and caption burn-in.
7. Creative Operations & Offshore Team Management
   • You will help keep the creative function running efficiently, owning the processes and tools that enable quality output at scale.
   • Own and maintain design templates, toolkits, and file structures across static and motion formats.
   • Brief and quality-check output from our offshore design team, maintaining brand and quality standards.
   • Manage handover processes between design, video, and development/marketing teams.
   • Contribute to documenting creative processes and ways of working to support onboarding and knowledge transfer.
   • Flag capacity issues proactively and work with the Creative Lead to prioritise workload effectively.
8. AI Tools & Creative Innovation
   • We are committed to staying ahead of the curve on emerging tools and expect our Senior Digital Designer to lead from the front.
   • Actively explore and adopt AI-powered tools for image generation, video enhancement, asset creation, and workflow automation.
   • Apply AI tools to improve both the speed and quality of content output — particularly for asset variation, background generation, and video editing.
   • Share learnings with the wider team and contribute to a culture of creative experimentation.
   • Stay current with emerging social and video formats, platform algorithm changes, and what is driving creative performance across the industry.

Behaviors

• Ambitious: As individuals, in our teams and across the business, we are always working to improve.
• Proactive: We actively develop ideas and take opportunities instead of working reactively.
• Thoughtful: Beyond our products, we take a personal approach in everything we do.
• Connected: When we work together, we make great things happen.
• Aspirational: At every step of the way, we give each My 1st Years gift emotional value.

Work Location: Hybrid remote in Northampton NN4 5FB