Art Director

Job Description

Job Description

Description:

The opportunity

We're looking for a maker with a high talent ceiling: a designer who can take a rough request and turn it into original, elevated work across merch concepts, apparel, illustration, brand design, and packaging. This is the person who makes a concept sell before a single unit is produced. 

You'll work the elevated end of the graphic services queue. Sales submits creative requests, and while our production designers handle logo placement and pre-production files, the harder, higher-craft jobs come to you: original concepts, real illustration, brand work, and presentation-grade design. This is a hands-on making seat, not an administrative one. You'll spend your days in the work, not coordinating other people's. 

Brandability lives in the branded merchandise and promotional world, and our clients trust us to make their brands look sharp on everything from apparel to packaging. We need someone who knows that world cold and raises the bar on what comes out of it. 

What you'll do

Original design and illustration

• Take the elevated, original creative on jobs that come through the graphic services queue: merch concepts, illustration, brand design, and packaging. 
• Push past the obvious. Bring concepts clients haven't seen and competitors can't copy. 
• Own the craft. Typography, composition, color, and finish that reads as premium. 

Merch, apparel, and promo

• Design apparel and promotional products people actually want to wear and use, not just wear a logo. 
• Know the merch and promo world: product categories, decoration methods, and what production needs to make a concept real. 
• Produce presentation-ready mockups and virtual product imagery that help clients see and buy the vision. 

Brand and presentation  

• Build the visual story for the pitches and presentations that help win and grow accounts. 
• Deliver full brand work: identity, guidelines, and the deliverable libraries that come with it. 
• Set the bar for what leaves the studio and raise the level of the people around you. 

What you are

-You have strong fundamentals: typography, composition, color, hierarchy. You're drawn to strong design and you have a point of view. You know what great work looks like, and you can articulate why. 

-You're a maker first. Hand you a brief and you start seeing it immediately: the concept, the form, the references. Your taste is refined but flexible enough to serve a wide range of brands and products. 

-You bring something new. We have a portfolio and a visual language we're proud of, and we want someone who can honor it and push it forward.

Requirements:

• Expert proficiency in Adobe Creative Suite, especially Illustrator, Photoshop, and InDesign. 
• Real illustration ability. You can draw and build original artwork, not just arrange existing assets. 
• Apparel and merch design experience, with a working knowledge of decoration methods and how a concept gets produced. 
• Experience producing presentation-ready merchandise mockups and virtual product imagery. 
• Packaging design experience. 
• Full branding experience: identity systems, brand guidelines, and large deliverable libraries. 
• Skilled use of Midjourney and other generative AI image tools, backed by strong prompting, for concepting and presentation imagery. 
• The ability to prepare clean files that hand off cleanly to our production designers. 
• A portfolio that shows range, taste, and craft, not just execution. 
• The ability to run multiple jobs at once without losing attention to detail. 
• Strong communication. You'll work with sales, account managers, and production to get concepts made. 

Nice to have

• Strong working knowledge of Canva, including brand kit and template management. 
• Photography direction for product shoots, with the ability to communicate and execute a vision on set. (In-person) 
• A command of lighting, composition, and staging strong enough to art direct talent, stylists, and photographers to a specific result. (In-person) 
• Comfort operating our in-house DSLR and strobe kit for product photography and ad hoc requests. (In-person) 
• Motion graphics or short-form video editing. 
• Familiarity with Asana or a similar project management tool. 
• Agency experience. 

Why Brandability

We're a brand-focused company with real range across merch, creative, and strategy, and we're growing. You'll have ownership over meaningful work from day one, real creative influence, and direct access to senior leadership. We care about doing great work and building something worth being proud of. 

If you want to be in a box, this probably isn't it. If you want to help set the creative bar for a growing brand company, and you have the chops to back it up, we'd love to hear from you.