Art Director (Freelance)

Opportunity for Temp to Perm conversion.

POSITION SUMMARY: The Art Director is a highly creative and strategic design leader with a solid understanding and hands-on ability to develop and execute compelling, visual design solutions across all brand touchpoints, including print, digital, and social platforms. In this role you will partner closely with the Senior Art Director to manage creative output across a high volume pipleline, ensuring work is cohesive across touchpoints and delivered at the highest standard.

A key focus of this role is shaping and elevating the brand’s social presence — overseeing social content development and guiding the social team to deliver compelling, culturally relevant, and on-brand storytelling.

KEY RESPONSIBILITIES:

• Partner closely with the Senior Art Director to prioritize, delegate, and manage overall creative workload, ensuring projects are resourced effectively and delivered at the highest standard across all channels.
• Oversee the creative development of social-first content, partnering with the Social Media Manager and Content Creator to translate brand and campaign concepts into platform-native ideas that drive engagement and growth.
• Oversee and guide the Social Content Creator, providing clear creative direction, feedback, and mentorship to ensure output is elevated, on-brand, and optimized for performance.
• Collaborate cross-functionally to ensure e-commerce and editorial shoots are concepted with downstream usage in mind, including social, email, homepage, and PDP content—maximizing efficiency and content output per shoot.
• Hold ownership over the look-and-feel, tone and manner of creative projects, continually striving to elevate the brand while ensuring thoughtful and consistent execution across all points of brand contact.
• Support the development of concepts for photoshoot campaigns from concept to final implementation.
• Contribute to the overall efforts of the internal creative department by delivering innovative campaigns, creative platforms and deliverables with solid, articulated creative strategy.
• Establish strategic creative solutions and develop a holistic consumer journey across multiple platforms. In addition to managing a team of direct reports, you will also manage freelance support and agency partners.
• Provide direction for design and branding teams design, creative tools etc.
• Partner closely with production teams to calendarize, schedule and staff studio e-commerce shoots and special projects, on time and within budget
• Motivate, inspire, and lead a robust team of creatives. Serve as a hands-on leader that drives quality and fosters a culture of innovation and pushing boundaries to create elevated and on brand assets.
  
  

REQUIREMENTS:

• 5+ years of in-house Art direction experience, with substantial exposure to a wide variety of focus areas, including brand strategy, digital marketing materials, visual design, merchandising and collateral materials
• Proven experience in leading and managing creative individuals
• Should have robust network of photographers, stylists, producers, agencies, freelancers, etc.
• Motivate and inspire others to achieve their best work and to create an enriching, high performance culture
• Ability to make crucial creative decisions in a timely manner and serve as a composed and solution-oriented leader
• Understanding of digital, social, PR, experiential, emerging platforms, and the evolving media landscape
• Strategic and analytical thinking and know what will move the needle
  
  

$100,000 - 130,000 base salary (This range represents the low and high end of the anticipated base salary range for this NY - based position. The base salary will depend on numerous factors such as: experience and qualifications for the role, experience level, skillset, and balancing internal equity relative to other A+O employees.)

This job description is not an exhaustive list of all functions that the employee may be required to perform, and the employee may be required to perform additional functions. Additionally, the job responsibilities may change at any time as necessitated by business demands.