Director, Brand Design

Articulate is the leading SaaS provider of online training solutions for the new world of work. Our industry-leading course creation platform makes it easy for organizations to build engaging, custom content to effectively onboard new hires, stay compliant, upskill employees, and more. As the Director, Brand Design, you’ll lead the creative and strategic alignment of our multidisciplinary Brand Design team across all verticals, ensuring systems and work align with the business priorities and brand standards, and provide creative direction for the team. You’ll work closely with the VP of Design, Directors of Messaging and Product Design, and Creative Operations and Marketing teams to build and maintain a strong brand that makes a genuine connection across the full customer experience. Our ideal candidate is a highly experienced, strategic design leader with deep experience managing teams of designers in a SaaS or in-house B2B setting. You’re passionate about building strong cross-functional relationships and fostering a creative culture of collaboration, positivity, innovation, and growth. As a leader, your proficiency in presenting to executives with confidence and clarity is high. You’re well-versed in leading multidisciplinary creative teams in close collaboration with marketing to deliver consistent, high-converting design across web, digital, print, motion, social, and event production. You’re able to lead, inspire, and nurture a growing brand design team, demonstrate deep self-awareness and empathy, and naturally elevate others to do their best work. What You'll Do:

Creative Leadership

Work directly with executive leadership team on brand strategy, presenting creative work, defending design decisions, and fostering alignment 

Build key frameworks for scale, quality, and cohesion across Brand Design

Drive creative and strategic alignment of our Brand Design team across all verticals, ensuring systems and work meet business needs and brand standards.

Partner with top design leadership including VP of Design, Messaging Design, and Creative Ops leaders to identify holistic design team challenges, foster visibility and alignment, cultural wins, and team growth opportunities 

Help maintain a customer-centric and innovative culture at Articulate

Team Management and Mentorship 

Foster alignment across Brand Design with key internal initiatives, consistent operations, manager coaching, prioritization guidance, and fostering efficiency.

Identify key opportunities for strategic collaboration across Brand Design verticals as well as with the greater design and marketing organization. 

Nurture clear and frequent communication lines across cross-functional teams to effectively drive project work and new initiatives forward. 

Manage, coach, and mentor senior design managers, supporting their growth as strategic leaders and ensuring they are empowered to lead their verticals effectively.

Demonstrate a strong and strategic leadership voice, instilling confidence, mitigating team anxiety, speaking for impact across all audiences, and elevating team morale through clear, impactful communication.

Foster a culture of experimentation, rapid ideation, and comfort with AI tooling in strategic applications for increased velocity and impact across brand creative. 

Own the strategic makeup and structure of your team, setting the team up for success with key partners across Design and GTM in accordance with business goals. 

Design Thinking & Storytelling

Translate business priorities into long-range creative strategies in partnership with Messaging Design, ensuring each strategic area (growth & motion, brand & identity, web) aligns to company goals and evolves cohesively.

Strategically push the evolution of the Articulate brand experience and identity, how it drives business value with clear outcomes, and how it resonates with our core audiences.

Provide focused design feedback or creative direction where work may be missing the strategic mark, falling outside of our brand guidelines, quality bar, or executive vision.

Run design thinking sessions and creative discovery exercises to build awareness, define new creative possibilities, and create team alignment.

Track and communicate team impact, helping design tell its story with clarity and credibility at the executive level.

Design Execution

Oversee execution and output of Brand Design and partner with Messaging Design to deliver holistic creative concepts that align with the strategic brand vision.

Guide creative vision, ensuring a tight connection to marketing goals. 

Own Brand Design planning and prioritization with guidance on resourcing, prioritization, and allocation and identifying key risks with key support from Creative Ops. 

Continually push our existing brand creative to keep quality high and competitive while keeping consistent with our design systems, or identifying opportunities for systems evolution

Identify when external creative partners are needed, defining criteria, reviewing portfolios/capabilities, making final selection decisions.

Set a vision and champion a high bar for Brand Design excellence and consistency that inspires experimentation and bold thinking across the organization and establishes Articulate as a design-forward brand.

Cross-functional Collaboration

Foster creative alignment between Design and GTM across key priorities, playing an active role in strategic planning, prioritization, and mapping of new opportunities for maximum business impact.

Partner closely with leadership in Product Design, Messaging Design, and Creative Operations to maintain and evolve our operations for maximum efficiency. 

Represent Brand Design in org-wide initiatives, contributing to design organization priorities like hiring, rituals, team health, and craft quality in partnership with other Directors.

Collaborate with key Marketing and Design leaders to shape the evolution of Articulate's brand, voice, and creative strategy as our company and platform evolve.

Nurture clear and frequent communication lines across the wider cross-functional team to effectively drive project work and new initiatives forward with shared buy-in.

Proactively identify opportunities with cross-functional partners for better and more strategic brand outcomes throughout the organization.

Team Citizenship

Cultivate a strong design culture, fostering collaboration, inclusion, and a shared commitment to quality across the entire Brand org.

Host learning sessions for the team to build camaraderie, increase knowledge, and expand creative expertise

Help with hiring, partner management and onboarding of new team members 

Demonstrate professional, positive, and proactive communication with peers—model self-awareness and empathy 

Be an advocate for design; educate and enable the team and the wider org to create meaningful brand experiences.

What You Should Have:

12-15+ years of brand and visual design experience with a deep focus in building in-house brands, shaping creative across a wide range of marketing channels for a high-growth B2B software company or creative agency.

An experienced people leader (7-10+ years in management) with a track record of leading design teams both strategically and supportively, creating an inclusive creative culture of growth, development, and levity

Bachelor’s degree in Graphic Design, Interaction Design, or related field

Deep knowledge, passion, and expertise in all aspects of design including systems, layout, typography, illustration, image making, digital and event/brand experience production

Clear aptitude for connecting a brand to its product and customers, solving for the full customer experience, and thinking strategically with the end-to-end journey in mind

Strong sense of concept development, strategy, research, and problem-solving in a fast-paced, iterative environment

Able to distill down complex systems, ideas, and strategies into the key details that align to business needs, achieving executive level buy-in, and building trust and confidence throughout the org

Clear communicator, verbally and visually; able to give constructive and actionable design feedback to team members 

An expert-level portfolio that shows a high taste level; strong strategic, out-of-box thinking; and meaningful audience impact across a range of project types

Proficient with a variety of creative tools including Figma, Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, and Notion with ability to make informed technical recommendations

Avid user of AI tooling across use cases both within creative work and other opportunity areas