Design Director

The opportunity

You're a thinker and maker who leads the creative team on major engagements. You set a strong creative point of view and coach the team to deliver their best work, elevating not just what we deliver but how we work. You're connecting creative excellence with commercial outcomes and contributing to how Interbrand is known in the market.

You're a holistic creative who architects comprehensive brand systems that work intelligently and beautifully across all consumer touchpoints—physical, digital, social, and emerging platforms. You're proficient in emerging creative tools and AI applications, and you have the judgment to know when to use them to amplify creative work and when craft must be unmediated. You shape how your team approaches tool selection, emerging technologies, and cross-channel design thinking.

What you’ll be doing

• Interrogate briefs with strategy and client management, reframing challenges to unlock distinctive creative opportunities
• Lead the creative platform on your projects, architecting scalable systems that work coherently across all touchpoints, including web, mobile, social, physical retail, packaging, events and emerging channels.
• Identify and frame potential iconic moves, testing feasibility with delivery and challenging the team to think bigger. Consider how the ideas can travel across contexts to better resonate with the audience.
• Build senior relationships with clients and partners, leading co-creation sessions that shape decisions
• Develop your team, coaching individuals towards their potential and creating space for originality to emerge. Encourage them to think across channels and think about the whole consumer journey.
• Structure how creative work flows, setting rituals and reviews that keep momentum and quality high
• Own creative delivery, managing scope, budget, and timeline while anticipating and mitigating risks
• Provide critique that's clear and decisive, holding the quality bar and ensuring production-ready work
• Present your work with conviction, connecting human insight, commercial value, and experience together
• Stay ahead of tools, methods, and emerging practices, bringing these into how our team works. Help evaluate new design software, AI tools and other emerging technologies that will help strengthen the creative capability within the company.
• Contribute to proposals, building cases for investment, and elevating Interbrand's reputation through awards and recognition
• Partner with Brand Economics, understanding impact and using that to inform creative priorities

 

What we’re looking for:

Experience
Proven track record leading creative work on significant client engagements. Portfolio showing systems excellence and how ideas work across multiple channels and touchpoints.

Demonstrated expertise in holistic brand design with evidence of leading projects where a single identity system performs effectively across radically different contexts and platforms. Proficiency with emerging creative tools; understanding of how AI can enhance creative work.

Craft
You bring clarity about what's distinctive and why it matters. You generate routes that unlock both commercial value and memorable experiences. You know the difference between good and great. You understand how to design systems that are coherent yet flexible and how a brand can feel unified across touchpoints while adapting intelligently to context, audience, and channel requirements.

Collaboration
You work seamlessly across disciplines, bringing strategy and delivery into creative conversations. You navigate tensions between vision and feasibility thoughtfully, not by compromising either.

Leadership
You develop people and bring out their best work. You coach individuals, create space for contribution, and help the team understand the thinking behind decisions. You shape how your team thinks about and works with emerging tools, balancing technological curiosity with craft standards.

Communication
You tell compelling stories about your work that move people to action. You adapt your approach for different audiences and know how to frame choices so people understand what matters.

Ownership
You operate autonomously and own outcomes. You anticipate risks, structure teams and timelines for success, and deliver at scale.

Why Interbrand
For over 50 years, we’ve been shaping the world’s most iconic brands. We solve brand challenges through our Thinking & Making approach, combining Human Truth, Brand Economics, and Experience to help our clients make the moves that unlock growth and define what’s next.

We nurture a global community of thinkers and makers with the curiosity and confidence to create iconic work. Here, you’ll find transparent career pathways, on-demand learning, honest feedback and real collaboration across borders.

We don’t do ordinary. And we don’t expect you to either.

 

NOTE: This is a hybrid role and requires you to be in our NYC office 3 days per week

Compensation

• Salary range of $120K to $150K
• This range represents the low and high end of the base salary someone in this role may earn as an employee of Interbrand in the United States. Salaries will vary based on various factors including but not limited to professional and academic experience; training; associated responsibilities; other business and organizational needs; and geographic location (to account for comparative cost of living). The range listed is just one component of our total compensation package for employees. Salary decisions are dependent on the circumstances of each hire.
• Benefits for this role include: Health/Vision/Dental Insurance; Family Forming Benefits; 401(k); Employee Stock Purchase Program; Annual Education Assistance; Health and Wellness Discounts; Spending and Saving Accounts; Vacation, Sick, and Personal Days; Paid Parental and Medical Leave; Life, AD&D and Disability Insurance; EAP