Design Director: Brand Strategy & Creative Leadership

FutureBrand; Greater London; On-site; GBP 90,000 - 140,000; Full time

Job summary

FutureBrand in London is seeking a Design Director to act as the team captain, master your craft, and elevate everything around you. You will mentor a strong design team, champion brand aesthetics, and drive strategic and creative direction for consumer branding and packaging projects.

You will challenge conventions, spark innovation, and lead by example, shaping client partnerships and ensuring high-quality, profitable outcomes across campaigns and future brand work.

Responsibilities

• Instrumental in the creation of future brands.
• Lead and push the strategic and creative direction ensuring that we produce exceptional and insightful creative solutions.
• A natural storyteller, you excite, compel and inspire those around you– from clients to colleagues.
• Build a strong understanding of the client’s culture, business motivations and long-term plans and get under the skin of the client’s brief and wider category context
• Responsible for ensuring you and the team produce category breaking creative that can be expressed across all points of connected experience.
• Have a point of view and never be afraid to share it. Understand new trends and creative. Be the go-to person for insights, updates and news.
• Work collaboratively with the wider team to steer and inform the direction of the strategy. You are able to communicate brand strategy into creative.
• Take pride in the quality of our client presentations and make sure the work is sold as effectively as it deserves.
• Develop solid and trusted relationships with your clients. Get to know your clients and be able to deal with them directly. Understand and share their passion for their brand, as well as their pressures and frustrations.
• A collaborator. Building rock solid relationships at every turn.
• A valued member of the business you have strong relationships with your peers across the breath of the agency and work together to get the best results.
• Contribute to a highly collaborative and energized atmosphere in which positive disruption is encouraged.
• Develop relationships with your peers within the FutureBrand Group more broadly.
• Develop a great team of designers. Drive your team with integrity, ambition and maintain an appetite of excellence across all that your team delivers.
• Be effective with your conversations and feedback, even if some of those conversations aren’t easy. Manage difficult situations but know when to involve more senior colleagues.
• Use your experience to advise the team on how to shape and deliver their work. A solid mentor, imparting your knowledge and expertise, whilst helping the more junior team members grow and flourish.
• Exude a spirit of generosity and perceptiveness towards others in the agency. Inspiring through your actions and your openness.
• Nurture the growth and health of your clients’ business.
• Be commercially conscious, understanding how you get the best out of your project and your team to deliver exceptional and profitable results.
• Work closely with project management to accurately and actively define and scope projects.
• Make sure we deliver a quality project, to an extremely happy client, while balancing the agency’s commercial and reputational interests.
• Along with your other triumvirate partners you lead the creative and have a shared responsibility for Account development, Quality of work, Commercial ‘health’, Team ‘health’ and wellbeing.
• There are always pressure points in our industry, but you are an expert in remaining calm under pressure and can support others in achieving the same.
• Experiment with new approaches and create new opportunities within projects to develop our offer and broaden & deepen our relationships with clients
• Hungrily seek out growth opportunities for the brand and the agency. Understand the wider FutureBrand Group and McCann WorldGroup offering and actively promote their services to your client.

Job description

FutureBrand in London is seeking a Design Director to act as the team captain, master your craft, and elevate everything around you. You will mentor a strong design team, champion brand aesthetics, and drive strategic and creative direction for consumer branding and packaging projects.

You will challenge conventions, spark innovation, and lead by example, shaping client partnerships and ensuring high-quality, profitable outcomes across campaigns and future brand work.