Creative Director
Josephmark is in an exciting phase of rapid growth as a company, doubling in size over the past 18 months. Our headcount is now 50 strong, made up of an eclectic mix of designers, developers, strategists, copywriters, and technologists spread across Brisbane, Hobart, Sydney, Los Angeles, New York City, and Mexico. We’ve built brands and ventures, startups and scaleups for the last 17 years, all with a focus on changing the ways we work, play, and live.
As a team, we’ve innovated, branded, rebranded, and strategized around emerging and existing technologies that are shaping our collective future. Clients span a wide range of industries, everything from world-leading record labels to new technologies, and the futures of agtech, fintech, and sextech. Our growth trajectory means we’re looking to appoint a remote-friendly Creative Director to head up the design team in Australia.
What makes this role different?
- As a venture studio, we build several different startup companies in rapid succession, meaning as a Creative Director you gain exposure to multiple projects at every phase of their business and dive in wherever they are in their journey. We love to focus on making a positive impact on people and the planet and our projects reflect this.
- A very diverse portfolio. Our design team solve complex problems on a daily basis, from what branding looks like in the metaverse, to the future of interactive design in VR and how this influences brand interactivity. You’ll be working on everything from indigenous language preservation platforms, children's education games, and immersive storytelling experiences to ventures in sextech, agtech and web3.
- One of our unique offerings is that you will be entitled to share in the proceeds of any investment made during your tenure at JM. This means you’ll have a more diversified portfolio than having all of your eggs in one startup basket.
- We’re a warm, genuine and inclusive group that has mutual admiration for each other's capabilities. We operate with a bias toward mentorship over management and offer genuine autonomy for everyone to pave their journey within Josephmark.
What’s in it for you?
Work with experienced multi-disciplinary teams:
- For our branding projects you get to bounce off multiple brand designers, art directors, motion designers, content strategists and external collaborators including photographers, CG artists and sound designers.
- For our venture work this extends to product and UX strategists, engineers and developers to ensure quality in all aspects of brand execution for our clients, own incubated ventures and joint-venture partnerships.
Inclusive improvement focus: This is a rare opportunity to evolve and iterate on the JM design methodology in close collaboration with our ECD. You will oversee and guide the ideation and execution of original, conceptual and systematic design approaches. You love the tension of balancing contemporary visual culture with tech-driven strategies and commercial objectives.
Thought leadership & mentorship: Once you find your groove and establish your practice, you get to inspire and cultivate a culture of excellence providing mentorship across all facets of brand activation, application and optimisation over time.
Project diversity: Contribute to a transparent, high-performance, people-driven culture that gets to work on diverse projects that are regenerative at their core.
About you:
- As a Creative Director, you’re an organized, articulate leader with an uncanny ability to multitask, and a true knack for seeing both the big picture and the finer details.
- You’re an essential member of team JM, as you’ll manage and mentor the team, while helping us foster and grow our world-class design and venture strategy capabilities.
- Ideally you should have at least 6-8 years of brand and digitial design experience, producing and leading award-winning work as well as running a creative team.
- You’re a seasoned brand designer with experience in technical or product-driven companies including working in a brand or design studio, managing in-house teams in high growth environments.
- As a Creative Director, leadership comes naturally to you. You’re able to exhibit thought leadership through day-to-day project work and offer mentorship and constructive feedback on projects to junior designers in the evolution of the work.
- You should be comfortable leading large projects from start to finish that garner praise internally and externally to JM.
- You have experience building thoughtful, compelling brand identity systems, executing across product, interface, web design, experiential, strategy and digital design.
- You’re a human-centred designer who innately understands people’s needs and translates these insights into innovative design solutions. You are just as passionate about design as you are about strategy and the analytical thinking behind your creative decisions.
- You have the ability to balance thoughtful and conceptual ideation with fast-paced execution in a dynamic environment. Your portfolio demonstrates your mastery of craft in composition, colour and imagery across typography, iconography and print.
- You’re a storyteller at heart, you can articulate ideas and written creative concepts that link users' needs and experiences with design and business objectives.
- Proficient in Figma, Adobe suite and comfortable using Notion, Pitch and Google suite. A degree in Design, Interactive Design, Visual Studies, or other design-related fields is certainly an advantage but not essential.
This is a full-time position that offers a competitive salary, equity and flexible working hours. We prefer this position to be in close proximity to our Brisbane office but are open to fully remote applicants who can align with Brisbane (AEST) time and for cross-collaboration projects, LA (PST) time zones.
At JM, we know better products start with diverse teams. We are an inclusive workplace committed to fostering a sense of thriving and belonging for all. That's why we strongly (see bold and underline usage) encourage members of underrepresented communities to apply. If you share our values and our venture mindset, you’ll find a home (with your work bffs) at Josephmark.
If you’re reading this and thinking, “Oh no, I only tick a few of those boxes so I’m not going to apply...”, don’t be silly. If you’re a standout human, we want to hear from you!
Colleen Morgan, Product Director
What’s the most interesting project you’ve worked on at JM? A video-on-demand project, think Netflix for South America. We traveled to Argentina, Colombia and Mexico to conduct field research for the product and branding. Had heaps of fun designing the experience for kids, met some amazing people (who I’m still friends with), and even squeezed in seeing some Mexican wrestling.
How long have you been in the industry for? 11 years. I've been at JM for 8+ years now. Before that, I was doing research in interaction and visual design. They even gave me the Dr. title for it.
What’s the best thing about working at JM? Working with people I love to see every single day. The work itself is so rewarding, but the people I get to sit side-by-side with enrich my life in so many ways beyond the studio walls.
What’s the worst thing about working at JM? That we are spread over many locations/timezones. Can someone please hurry up and invent a teleporter so our LA, Stockholm and Sydney peeps can pop into the studio for lunchtime hangs.
What’s something people might not know about being a strategist at JM? We have the privilege of going beyond strategic thinking about a product itself – feature releases, UX flows and the like – to a holistic consideration of the business. We're Venture Designers, helping 0-1 stage businesses, so we define financial models, expected growth, revenue streams, hiring plans, and operational costs. These models become essential tools for businesses to raise investment funds and bring their vision to life.
What advice do you have for strategists? Dive head-first into every new problem domain and relish in the challenge that is building new knowledge.
Link us to something cool.
https://www.goabstract.com/ – version control your designs like a boss.