Creative Director – Product & Building Set Design

Playwell Bricks Design Studio Ltd.; Halifax; On-site; CAD 90,000 - 120,000; Full time

Job summary

Playwell Bricks Design Studio Limited in Nova Scotia, Canada seeks a Creative Director – Product & Building Design to lead the creative development of Playwell Bricks products. This is a hands-on leadership role combining design, prototyping, and mentorship.

The successful candidate will establish design standards, manage a growing team, review work, collaborate with clients, and ensure manufacturability and a superior building experience.

Qualifications

• Minimum 5 years of professional retail or consumer-product design experience.
• Experience taking physical products from concept through commercial production.
• Experience designing products for manufacturing at scale.
• Professional graphic design experience.
• High proficiency in digital and physical building-brick design.
• Knowledge of design-for-manufacturing principles and BOMs.
• Experience developing and evaluating physical prototypes.
• Strong project-management and organizational skills.
• Excellent communication and presentation skills.
• Exceptional attention to detail.

Responsibilities

• Establish and maintain creative and product-design standards.
• Lead, mentor, and develop building-brick and graphic designers.
• Review designs and provide constructive creative direction.
• Establish design-review and approval processes.
• Recruit and evaluate new design talent.
• Foster a collaborative and experimental creative environment.
• Maintain creative quality and consistency across projects.
• Design complex building-brick models digitally and physically.
• Translate concepts into compelling building experiences.
• Balance aesthetics, structure, cost, and manufacturability.
• Develop and test physical prototypes.
• Review production samples and resolve design issues.
• Develop innovative building techniques and construction solutions.
• Ensure designs can be reproduced at commercial volumes.
• Translate client objectives into practical specifications.
• Establish piece-counts, sizes, and design parameters.
• Design within budgets and optimize BOMs.
• Collaborate with sourcing and production teams.
• Review instructions and packaging concepts.
• Provide direction for packaging, instructions, and graphics.
• Communicate creative and technical decisions clearly.

Skills

Retail/consumer design

Product design lifecycle

Graphic design

Building-brick design

Cost constraints

Design for manufacturing

Protototyping

BOM management

Product testing

Project management

Communication skills

Job description

Creative Director – Product & Building Set Design

Location: Nova Scotia, Canada

Company: Playwell Bricks Design Studio Limited

Position: Full-Time

About Playwell Bricks

Playwell Bricks Design Studio creates custom building-brick products for companies, organizations, collectors, and major brands around the world.

We transform products, buildings, vehicles, mascots, and ideas into engaging physical building experiences. Our work combines building-brick design, engineering, graphic design, packaging, instructions, sourcing, and production.

As Playwell Bricks grows, we are seeking an experienced creative leader to help define the next generation of our products and establish the standards that guide our design team.

The Role

We are seeking a Creative Director – Product & Building Design to lead the creative development of Playwell Bricks products.

This is a hands-on leadership position. The Creative Director will actively design, prototype, build, review, and improve products while leading and mentoring our growing creative team.

The successful candidate will be equally comfortable developing a building-brick model, reviewing another designer’s work, presenting concepts to clients, solving production challenges, and establishing creative direction.

You will help ensure every Playwell Bricks product achieves a high standard for design, building experience, presentation, manufacturability, and creativity.

Key Responsibilities

Creative Direction & Leadership

• Establish and maintain creative and product-design standards.
• Lead, mentor, and develop building-brick and graphic designers.
• Review designs and provide constructive creative direction.
• Establish effective design-review and approval processes.
• Help recruit and evaluate new design talent.
• Foster a collaborative and experimental creative environment.
• Maintain creative quality and consistency across projects.

Building-Brick & Product Design

• Design complex building-brick models digitally and physically.
• Translate products, vehicles, architecture, characters, brands, and concepts into compelling building experiences.
• Balance aesthetics, structural integrity, piece count, component availability, cost, and manufacturability.
• Develop and test physical prototypes.
• Review and improve designs produced by other team members.
• Develop innovative building techniques and construction solutions.
• Ensure designs can be reliably reproduced at commercial volumes.

Commercial Product Development

Lead products through the development process:

Client Brief - Concept - Design - Prototype - Costing - Testing - Instructions - Packaging - Production

Responsibilities include:

• Translate client objectives into practical product specifications.
• Establish piece-count, size, complexity, and design parameters.
• Design within manufacturing and project budgets.
• Optimize Bills of Materials (BOMs) for cost and availability.
• Identify unnecessary complexity and improve design efficiency.
• Evaluate component availability and sourcing challenges.
• Apply design-for-manufacturing principles.
• Collaborate with sourcing and production teams.
• Review production samples and resolve design issues.

Building Experience

Products must provide an excellent experience for both the builder and owner of the finished model.

The Creative Director will consider build progression, structural stability, audience-appropriate complexity, component identification, sequencing, instruction clarity, functionality, and final presentation.

Graphic Design, Packaging & Instructions

• Provide direction for packaging, building instructions, printed components, decals, and graphics.
• Ensure visual consistency between products and client brands.
• Review instructions for clarity and usability.
• Oversee packaging concepts for corporate and retail products.
• Collaborate with graphic designers, printers, suppliers, and production partners.

Testing & Compliance

• Design products with applicable consumer-product safety requirements in mind.
• Understand relevant North American and international product and toy safety standards.
• Work with production and testing partners to determine requirements.
• Consider component, labeling, packaging, age-grading, and compliance requirements throughout development.

Client Collaboration

• Participate in client discovery and creative-development meetings.
• Translate client ideas into achievable product concepts.
• Present concepts, prototypes, and recommendations.
• Clearly communicate creative and technical decisions.
• Recommend alternatives when requests negatively affect cost, structural integrity, manufacturability, or quality.
• Incorporate client feedback while protecting product-design standards.

Project Management

• Manage multiple concurrent design projects and priorities.
• Establish realistic development schedules.
• Coordinate with sales, sourcing, production, graphic design, and clients.
• Identify design risks early.
• Ensure projects reach production-ready status on schedule.
• Help develop scalable internal design processes.

Required Qualifications

• Minimum 5 years of professional retail or consumer-product design experience, preferably with a recognized major brand.
• Demonstrated experience taking physical products from concept through commercial production.
• Experience designing products for manufacturing at scale.
• Professional graphic design experience.
• High proficiency in digital and physical building-brick design.
• Strong understanding of building techniques, structural integrity, geometry, scale, colour, and component usage.
• Experience designing within cost and manufacturing constraints.
• Knowledge of design-for-manufacturing principles.
• Experience developing and evaluating physical prototypes.
• Familiarity with BOMs, component management, and product costing.
• Familiarity with consumer-product testing and compliance.
• Experience working within multidisciplinary product-development teams.
• Creative leadership, mentorship, or team-management experience.
• Strong project-management and organizational skills.
• Excellent communication and presentation skills.
• Exceptional attention to detail.

Preferred Experience

Experience in any of the following is highly desirable:

• Construction toys or building systems.
• Major toy or consumer-product companies.
• Collectibles or model kits.
• Packaging and building-instruction design.
• Component sourcing and BOM optimization.
• Injection-moulded consumer products.
• International manufacturing.
• Working with factories, suppliers, printers, or packaging manufacturers.
• Toy and consumer-product safety standards.
• Managing multidisciplinary creative teams.
• Corporate or promotional products.
• Intellectual property, licensing, or brand-guideline compliance.
• Professional graphic-design and digital building/3D-design software.

The Person We’re Looking For

We are looking for someone who understands the difference between creating an impressive model and creating a successful commercial building product.

A great building-brick designer can create something beautiful. A great product designer can create something beautiful that can also be manufactured 1,000 times, stays within budget, uses obtainable components, provides an enjoyable building experience, can be clearly documented, meets testing requirements, and reaches the customer exactly as intended.

We need someone who can do both.

You should enjoy solving creative problems within real-world constraints and see piece count, cost, availability, manufacturing, packaging, and deadlines as part of the creative challenge.

Location & Relocation

This position is based in Nova Scotia, Canada. The successful candidate must be willing and able to relocate to Nova Scotia and work collaboratively with the Playwell Bricks team.

International candidates are welcome to apply; employment is subject to eligibility to work in Canada and applicable immigration or work-authorization requirements.

Application Requirements

Applicants should provide:

• Resume/CV.
• Professional product-design portfolio.
• Building-brick design portfolio.
• Examples of graphic-design, packaging, or instruction work.
• Examples of products taken from concept through commercial production.
• A description of their personal responsibilities on collaborative projects.

Selection Process

Shortlisted candidates should expect a practical product-design exercise based on a representative client brief with constraints such as piece count, production cost, dimensions, branding, audience, components, quantity, and deadline.

Candidates will be evaluated not only on the finished concept but on how they think—their ability to prioritize requirements, make trade-offs, solve structural challenges, manage costs, consider the building experience, and turn a creative brief into a commercially viable product.

Why Playwell Bricks

This is an opportunity to have a significant influence on the creative direction of a growing design studio.

We will help you shape products from the earliest idea through final production while helping establish the design standards, processes, team, and creative culture that will define the next stage of Playwell Bricks.