Design Director (Contract) Jobs

Overview:

Over the course of 8 years, The Garden has grown to become one of Canada’s top independent creative and brand strategy agencies, with clients including Sodastream, Roots Canada, Jack Astor’s, RBC Ventures, Tasco Appliances, Goemans Appliances, Rakuten Kobo, Fitzrovia Real Estate, TradeRev and Mama Earth Organics to name a few.

From brand strategy, design & naming, advertising, workshop design & facilitation, go-to-market planning, to content production (small and large scale) and digital solutions, The Garden delivers on an array of projects and solutions for our clients because of our innovative approach and agile process that is rooted in creative problem solving. No matter the assignment, we start with a “first we think, then we make” mentality.

About the Role:

The Garden is looking for a talented, enthusiastic and leadership oriented creative to join our team for a 6 month contract as a Design Director. The role will be a focus on equal parts creative output and creative management, helping the design team to continue to make great work.

We are looking for a Design Director who is able to quickly interpret business needs and client briefs and turn them into compelling creative solutions. Often working under tight deadlines while overseeing multiple projects, the Design Director must be a skilled manager of creatives with experience working with designers and art directors alike.

Primary Responsibilities

• Required to ensure that all products and experiences are delivered on time, on budget, and to the highest standards of quality.
• You will be required to work closely alongside our existing design team, with a main focus on management and guidance throughout the entire design process and from briefing, ideating to presentation and production.
• Your main role will be to bridge the link between creative employees and management.

Required Skills

• Experience design and design thinking as an asset
• Strong branding design and branding strategy skills
• Ability to understand the needs of our clients and their customers, and translate those needs into clear, actionable, creative outputs.
• 8+ years of experience or minimum 1 year experience as a design lead/director.
• Overseeing a wide range design led projects ranging from branding, print to digital
• UX/UI digital design skills ranging from user experience thinking to web design
• Work with clients to understand detailed requirements and determine a plan that will ensure they are met or exceeded.
• Collaborating with strategy, production and creative teams
• Experience collaborating, presenting and working with confidence
• Developing, reviewing and building on design ideas

Our Beliefs:

The Garden is a proudly independent creative and strategy agency founded on one core belief: the power of brand love.

Making a meaningful emotional connection with your audience (whether it’s making them laugh, making them cry, making them think, or some combination) is at the heart of our approach. In today’s world, reaching a specific person has become a well-honed science. But once you actually get in front of them, you need to be able to make them feel something real.

And that’s what we’re best at. To figure out what will spark that meaningful connection requires a tremendous amount of hard work and thinking, but the discomfort that can come with that is our comfort zone. We love tough problems, and we thrive on making people feel and think differently. Our favourite people to work with are passionate about not just what they do, but the power of human emotion. If that sounds like you, we’d love to hear from you.

There are two key principles that drive how we work as a team at The Garden:

1. As a creative services provider, we will each do everything within our power to ensure that we never miss a client deadline.

1. We will always ensure that the work we do over-delivers not only on our client’s high expectations but, more importantly, on our own.

We offer a highly flexible working environment that allows our employees to decide for themselves when, where, and how they will work most effectively to deliver against these expectations. Because of this, we do not have a formal Vacation Policy. In lieu of that, each employee of The Garden may take time off at his or her own discretion and with the approval of the Founding Partners.

As an equal opportunity employer, we believe diversity drives better thinking, creativity, and innovation, and we're committed to being a culture that includes and values different voices and perspectives.