Art Director / Creative Director

In-person (Brooklyn, NY) preferred, but remote candidates with exceptional relevant experience will receive equal consideration, particularly those with strong backgrounds in promotional products, branded merchandise, apparel, gifting, or related creative leadership.

About the Role

• Format Press is looking for an experienced creative leader to take ownership of the visual and creative standard of our client work.
• This person will oversee how our clients’ brands are interpreted, organized, presented, and executed across print, promotional products, apparel, corporate gifting, presentations, catalogs, portals, campaigns, and other branded materials.
• The role combines creative direction, client brand ownership, promotional product ideation, team leadership, and strong operational oversight.
• A major part of the position is helping clients determine what branded merchandise, gifts, apparel, promotional products, and collateral make sense for their audience, objective, season, or occasion. The right person should be able to take a request such as Nurses Week, an employee appreciation program, recruitment initiative, holiday, event, or corporate gift and develop relevant product ideas, determine how they should look and feel within the client’s brand, and present those ideas in a polished and compelling way.
• This person will also own the creative onboarding and artwork infrastructure for our clients, ensuring that logos, brand assets, templates, artwork, revisions, and production-ready files are properly created, organized, maintained, and accessible across the company.

Key Responsibilities

Client Brand and Artwork Ownership

• Take ownership of client brand assets beginning during onboarding.
• Ensure every new client is fully onboarded from a creative and artwork perspective.
• Review logos, brand guidelines, colors, fonts, templates, facility information, existing artwork, and related materials.
• Identify missing, outdated, incomplete, or unusable artwork and ensure it is corrected, recreated, or completed.
• Oversee artwork creation, cleanup, editing, revisions, and production preparation.
• Ensure logos and artwork are available in the appropriate formats for print, promotional products, apparel, embroidery, signage, digital applications, and other uses.
• Establish clear standards for how each client’s brand should be presented.
• Maintain an organized system for client artwork, templates, revisions, approvals, and final production files.
• Ensure teams throughout the company are always working from the correct and most current artwork.

Creative Direction

• Establish the visual direction for client work across print, promotional products, apparel, gifting, presentations, catalogs, portals, and campaigns.
• Determine how client concepts, mockups, presentations, and branded materials should look and feel.
• Set the creative direction for promotional products, swag, apparel, and gifting, including product style, colors, imprint treatments, packaging, and presentation.
• Develop product concepts that are relevant to the client’s brand, audience, objective, event, season, or occasion.
• Turn individual products into thoughtful branded concepts and complete programs rather than simply presenting a list of items.
• Review designer work and maintain a high creative standard.
• Step in personally on important projects when senior creative involvement is needed.
• Develop concepts and creative directions for high-value or strategically important initiatives.
• Balance strong creative thinking with budgets, timelines, production limitations, and commercial realities.

Promotional Products and Gifting

• Proactively recommend promotional products, branded merchandise, apparel, gifts, and collateral to clients.
• Understand the purpose behind a request and identify products that are genuinely relevant to the audience and occasion.
• Develop concepts for employee appreciation, healthcare recognition weeks, recruitment, resident engagement, events, conferences, holidays, corporate gifting, and other programs.
• Stay aware of new and interesting products, trends, materials, packaging ideas, and decoration methods.
• Determine how products should be branded so they feel intentional and aligned with the client’s identity.
• Present options in a visually compelling way that allows the client to understand and connect with the overall concept.

Team Leadership

• Lead and direct designers and other creative resources.
• Delegate work based on skill level, urgency, and complexity.
• Provide clear feedback and actionable creative direction.
• Develop designers rather than simply correcting their work.
• Establish templates, systems, standards, and workflows that improve consistency and efficiency.
• Build clear processes for artwork creation, revisions, approvals, file preparation, naming conventions, and final-file storage.
• Know when to delegate and when a project requires direct senior involvement.

Client Collaboration

• Participate directly in client conversations when creative expertise is needed.
• Advise clients on brand presentation, product selection, colors, imprint treatments, campaigns, gifting, and other creative decisions.
• Translate client goals into strong creative concepts.
• Bring proactive ideas to clients rather than waiting for them to identify a specific product.
• Present and defend creative recommendations intelligently while remaining open to client needs and business realities.
• Help clients see the bigger opportunity behind a request rather than simply fulfilling an item order.

Campaigns and Catalogs

• Lead creative development for seasonal campaigns and larger client initiatives.
• Develop concepts around holidays, employee appreciation, events, recruitment, resident engagement, corporate gifting, and other programs.
• Curate relevant products and collateral around each initiative.
• Create compelling presentations, mockups, themes, and visual stories that elevate individual products into cohesive branded programs.
• Take responsibility for Format Press seasonal catalogs and promotional presentations.
• Oversee materials used to present Format Press capabilities and ideas to clients.
• Ensure our own presentation standard reflects the level of creative quality we expect clients to trust us with.

Qualifications

• Significant professional graphic design, creative direction, or art direction experience.
• Strong knowledge of promotional products, branded merchandise, corporate gifting, apparel, or print is highly preferred.
• Exceptional command of typography, layout, branding, composition, and visual hierarchy.
• Advanced Adobe Creative Suite skills.
• Strong understanding of artwork preparation, file formats, vector artwork, imprint requirements, embroidery artwork, and production-ready files.
• Strong creative judgment and the ability to explain why one direction is stronger than another.
• Strong product sense and the ability to identify relevant merchandise based on the client, audience, occasion, and objective.
• Ability to combine product selection, branding, presentation, and storytelling into polished client-facing concepts.
• Leadership experience managing or directing designers.
• Strong delegation and project-management skills.
• Strong client-facing communication skills.
• Highly organized and capable of building scalable creative systems.
• Able to balance creative excellence with deadlines, budgets, production limitations, and client objectives.
• Confident without ego: able to strongly advocate for an idea while changing direction when a better solution becomes clear.

Strongly Preferred

Experience in one or more of the following is a major advantage:

• Nursing homes, senior living, healthcare, or healthcare marketing.
• Promotional products, branded merchandise, corporate gifting, apparel, or print.
• Developing merchandise concepts for events, employee programs, holidays, corporate gifts, conferences, recruitment, recognition programs, or special occasions.
• Managing client brand assets, artwork libraries, templates, and production files.
• Working with multi-location organizations that require consistent brand execution across many facilities.
• Building catalogs, promotional campaigns, product presentations, or company-store creative systems.