The Design Manager is both a manager and a Creative Director practitioner. As a Design Manager, your role is to ensure the Design Team (an award-winning, international-caliber group of Designers and Art Directors) is healthy and focused. As a CD, your role is to oversee key accounts/projects and helm strategic pitches. While approximately half of your job has a management focus, there is still a sizeable contribution to client work and pitch. As a result, you must be adept at managing your time and prioritizing the needs of clients and staff.
Blast Radius creates complex, experiential, consumer-facing applications that involve close collaboration among Business Strategists, Technologist and UE professionals (CDs, Interaction Architects, Usability Strategists, Content Strategists, Art Directors and Interface Developers). The CD’s role is as a lightening rod for the intersection of these groups, providing coaching, support, and vision to ensure innovative ideas emerge. The Design Team’s primary focus is to realize the customer experience vision through intelligent, human-centered design and online marketing.
The User Experience Team is a highly talented, multidisciplinary group that has been dubbed the ‘’UN of U’’ for its eclectic, worldwide membership; over ten nationalities are represented within our ranks. This diversity brings a wonderful confluence of styles. Support for this vision is important and success in this role will be determined by your ability to negotiate deliverables, timelines, performance, and viewpoints.
As an ideal Design Manager candidate, you have at least 3 to 5 years of creative management experience and at least 7 to 10 years of experience as a Senior Creative Director. You are fluent with experience, service, and/or product design, plus have a solid grasp of distributed commerce, community and customer experience. You are well versed in complex design systems, big-brand architecture, colour theory, typography, grid systems, motion graphics, etc. Lastly, you are comfortable mentoring, presenting and working with senior partners and clients.
Responsibilities
- Team Management
- Manage the professional growth of design team (career goals and paths, training, and mentoring)
- Recruit aggressively, retain intelligently, and prune decisively
- Advocate for designers within UE and the company
(Working with studio manager): Approve/recommend designers for projects and optimize team utilization and chargeability
- Department Leadership:
- Develop, refine, and manage process
- Set benchmarks and goals
- Develop, organize, and distribute design tools
- Surface best practices and share intellectual property to educate team and company
- Sell group’s experience and services to GMs and other departments
- Sponsor key design projects
- Design Stewardship:
- Occasionally lead design approach on pitch or key projects
- Generally, oversee active design projects to ensure quality
- Represent design group at key pitches
- Set benchmarks
- Represent company at industry level
- Establish affiliations with leading schools worldwide
- Manage the professional growth of design team (career goals and paths, training, and mentoring)
- Recruit aggressively, retain intelligently, and prune decisively
- Advocate for designers within UE and the company
(Working with studio manager): Approve/recommend designers for projects and optimize team utilization and chargeability - Department Leadership:
- Develop, refine, and manage process
- Set benchmarks and goals
- Develop, organize, and distribute design tools
- Surface best practices and share intellectual property to educate team and company
- Sell group’s experience and services to GMs and other departments
- Sponsor key design projects
- Occasionally lead design approach on pitch or key projects
- Generally, oversee active design projects to ensure quality
- Represent design group at key pitches
- Set benchmarks
- Represent company at industry level
- Establish affiliations with leading schools worldwide
Required Skills/Experience
- 3 to 5 years design management experience
- 7 to 10 years design experience
- Fluency in information/interaction-based design systems, and televisual/motion graphic-based experiences
- Fluency with digital design process and tools
- Exceptional presentation skills
- Strong negotiation skills
- Strong understanding of experience design and it?s components: design and design systems, copywriting and content strategy, and usability and interaction design
- Understanding of customer experience methodology, history, and community
- Strong understanding of branding, marketing, advertising, and PR
Attributes
- Accountable
- Energetic
- Razor sharp
- Active rather than passive
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