Associate Design Director (Brand)

Designers at Smart are rooted in strategic understanding and human-centered design. They believe that great design is based on empathy – understanding people, how they behave, what they care about, and what they want to achieve. They have the ability to bring an experience to life regardless of the medium spanning across brand identity, print, packaging, digital UX/UI, and the physical. 

Smart offers an opportunity to reinvent or evolve products and services based on user research from the front-end of innovation to the final vision and execution. Clients range from fast-growing startups to some of the most recognized brands in health & wellness, consumer products, and non-profits.

The position has four primary areas of focus as outlined below.  

Key Responsibilities:

1. Creative direct brand experience programs that could stretch from physical product/packaging innovation to digital communities or UI/UX. Projects will create compelling design languages or push existing ones to ensure it’s meaningful and relevant to consumers, and authentic and ownable to the brand.
2. Represent strategic storytelling and brand experience and develop points of view for Business Development efforts.
3. Author thought leadership: Create new points of view for use in articles and videos for marketing purposes. Build content development and speak externally about Smart’s capabilities.
4. Mentorship of staff: Define responsibilities and expectations for report-tos, and project team members, providing project guidance and helping their professional growth.

Naturally, you have:

• 10+ years of experience as a designer, establishing look and feel in product innovation projects across packaging, print and digital (15+ years of experience at the Director level)
• Past experience with ethnographic and user research to influence and shape design decisions
• The experience and ability to lead complex projects and to be the client-facing lead
• Experience estimating project resource needs for proposals and resourcing
• Impressive visual design skills: creating brand guidelines and style guides (color palette, typography, imagery, iconography, illustration & photography, tone of voice etc.), visual storytelling, concepting and sketching 
• Experience managing and mentoring visual designers in their professional growth and development of production ready assets 
• Skill in presenting (selling solutions) to clients
• Provided thought leadership to innovation, design and business communities

We are committed to creating an inclusive culture and are proud to be an equal opportunity employer. At this time, we are unable to sponsor for this position.