Responsibilities

• Lead creative strategy for customer accounts: Participate in kickoff calls and creative interviews with customers to understand their brand identity, visual goals, and content objectives
• Write and shape design briefs: Translate customer needs and content strategies into clear, actionable briefs that production designers can execute against
• Review and elevate production work: QA design deliverables before they reach the customer, ensuring visual quality, brand consistency, and creative ambition go beyond "just layout"
• Expand and refine customer brand systems: When customers lack the design assets or visual identity needed for production work, lead brand-level design initiatives (color palettes, typography systems, icon sets, illustration styles, brand guidelines)
• Manage and mentor production designers: Oversee 2+ freelance designers, providing clear feedback, establishing standards, and building a consistent creative process
• Advise on creative direction for data visualization: Help customers think beyond default charts and graphs.
• Guide the team toward more narrative, visually compelling ways to present data in reports, ebooks, and presentations
• Collaborate with content strategists: Work alongside Heads of Content and content marketers to ensure design and content reinforce each other
• Shape the design practice: Contribute to how we scope, price, and deliver design services as this part of the business grows

Requirements

• 5+ years of design experience, with meaningful time spent in a creative direction or design leadership role—ideally at an agency, studio, or in-house creative team serving B2B/tech customers
• Strong visual taste and range: You have a sharp eye and can work across brand identity, editorial/layout design, data visualization, and digital content formats (ebooks, slide decks, social graphics)
• Strategic thinking: You don\'t just make things look good; you understand why design choices matter for the audience, the brand, and the business goal
• Brief-writing and communication skills: You can distill a customer conversation into a clear creative brief that a designer can run with, and you can articulate design rationale to non-designers
• Experience managing designers: You\'ve given feedback, set standards, and helped other designers grow, whether as a formal manager or a senior creative leading a team
• Customer-facing confidence: You\'re comfortable in customer meetings, can ask the right questions to uncover creative needs, and can present and defend creative direction
• Proficiency in Figma (primary tool) and familiarity with Adobe Creative Suite (Illustrator, InDesign, Photoshop)
• Reliability and responsiveness: Fractional doesn\'t mean sporadic. You\'re reachable, you hit deadlines, and you follow through

Preferred

• Experience with B2B SaaS brands or content marketing agencies
• Familiarity with AI design tools and how they can support (not replace) creative workflows
• Motion/animation skills (GIFs, basic animation) or ability to art-direct animation work
• Experience building or scaling a design practice or creative team from early stages