Manager, Graphic Design

POSITION SUMMARY

The Manager of Graphic Design will develop Marketing assets across Inspire touchpoints, weaving Inspire’s brand visual identity into all content including brand and seasonal campaign assets, brand’s customer site content, social and blog content, marketing materials, and ad-hoc deliverables. This role will be responsible for ensuring creative support for business growth.

All design should serve to tell the compelling story of our brand mission, values and product offering while remaining in line with Inspire’s visual aesthetic. While this role will not manage UX design, they will work closely with the Product Design team to maintain visual cohesion between Brand and Product Marketing.

The role both creates Marketing assets and approves creative execution of assets from outside agency partners to ensure brand visual standards are met.

This role reports to the Director of Campaigns & Content.

THE MANAGER, GRAPHIC DESIGN HAS NINE MAIN RESPONSIBILITIES

1. Conceive of design ideas based on marketing briefs and business needs
2. Integrate Inspire’s visual identity into all branded materials across the organization, ensuring consistency across the website, social, blog, marketing materials, products, and interdepartmental needs.
3. Uphold and enforce brand style guidelines and best practices across all deliverables. This includes maintaining an up-to-date accessible library of visual best practices and supporting assets and ensuring changes are communicated cross-functionally.
4. Translate ideas into sketches, wireframes, mock-ups to get input from stakeholders and iterate
5. Advise and educate internal stakeholders and external agency partners and freelancers on design-related decisions, best practices, and strategies.
6. Lead visual asset development in alignment with brand strategy, from concept development to production; this includes keeping an eye on clean energy, climate change, and sustainability industries, so that our creative is always of the moment and culturally relevant
7. Manage ideation, development and execution to support a range of Inspire initiatives such as ongoing brand and educational storytelling, brand and seasonal campaigns, product launches, company news etc. 
8. Handle multiple projects and deadlines simultaneously
9. Be a brand steward, obsessing over the details to ensure 100% brand consistency

SOME YEAR 1 DELIVERABLES

• Lead on-brand creative development across marketing efforts (e.g. direct mail, field marketing, email, digital ads, partnerships, website, and social) to ensure consistency; maintain regular touch bases with stakeholders managing efforts above to stay abreast of developments, launches and upcoming creative needs
• Maintain an organized, thorough, and always up-to-date database of creative best practices, guidelines, and tested/approved on-brand visual assets to support the seamless development of creative for projects
• Ensure creative efforts reflect the needs/voice/mission of the brand and support product/marketing campaigns

SUCCESS METRICS

• Create and maintain up-to-date, consistent, and compelling creative for all brand marketing assets 
• Ongoing production of high-quality, on-brand, and mission-aligned content for the website
• Develop compelling creative in an effort to drive brand awareness, audience engagement, support product launches, and solidify the brand as a trusted thought-leader in the clean energy space

DESIRED TRAITS

• Problem solve through design. Enjoys both concepting and executing designs. 
• Welcomes feedback on designs and appreciates a collaborative approach. 
• Thinks about new ways to make content engaging and visually compelling.
• Keeps a pulse on design and content trends.

EXPERIENCE

• Must Have
  • 5+ years in creative, graphic design roles at a brand or creative agency
  • Based on a marketing brief and business objectives, experience designing across multiple marketing formats and channels, including site, digital marketing, email, social, retail collateral.  
  • Hyper-creative thinker, who can flex between proposing big ideas to producing standard, educational marketing assets without sacrificing clarity or deviating from the brand mission/voice
  • Experience establishing and managing visual content workflows and making content creation decisions at the brand, product and channel level
  • Strong cross-functional relationship skills to move projects forward both internally and externally
  • Portfolio reflects refined typography skills, impactful design and branding sensibilities
  • Ability to autonomously take a high level creative direction and translate it to design concepts and executable designs
  • A digital-centric mentality when designing consumer touchpoints
  • Fluency in Adobe Creative Suite (Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign); and Figma a plus

• Nice to Have
  • BA or BFA in Graphic Design preferred
  • Team leadership experience
  • Experience managing freelancers or agency partners
  • Experience in a startup or high-growth environment
  • Illustration, animation, photography, videography, and/or UI/UX experience a plus