Associate Design Director (FULL TIME | LDN)
The Role:
Hey you! Come and change the world with us.
Shape History is the impact-first communications agency that creates powerful creative campaigns, brands, and strategic communications to drive progress toward a fairer world, faster.
We partner with charities, brands, NGOs, and changemakers to tackle some of the biggest issues facing humanity today — from Climate Change and Gender Equality to Digital Health and Human Rights. Our work spans brand identities, campaigns, flagship films and animations, digital assets, out-of-home activations, websites, and reports — all designed to spark action and social impact.
We’re looking for an Associate Design Director — someone with exceptional creative vision and leadership to guide our design team in producing brilliant, meaningful work across digital and offline channels.
You’ll be a hands-on creative, a mentor, and a strategic thinker who understands how creativity fuels both social impact and business growth. If you’re passionate about crafting work that makes a difference, we’d love to talk. This role is full-time, with at least two days in our London office, reporting to our Creative Director.
What you’ll do:
- Create impactful work
- Lead development and delivery of design concepts for brand and campaign assets across all channels and touch points.
- Art direct and oversee the visual execution of creative work, ensuring consistency, craft, and alignment with strategy.
- Lead creative sessions and workshops with our internal team, partners and external audiences.
- Design and/or oversee a range of outputs including: brand systems, cross-channel advertising campaigns (ATL/BLT), websites, events, reports, working with the industry’s best freelancers as and when is needed.
- Create and facilitate engaging in-person and virtual co-creation and stakeholder workshops.
- Build the best culture and guide the Design team
- Work with our Creative Directors to implement the creative direction across projects. Translate strategic goals and creative vision into compelling brand and campaign design ideas and executions.
- Create a collaborative, inclusive, and empowering culture within the design team to thrive.
- Nurture team members’ development with regular feedback, mentorship, and growth opportunities.
- Oversee workloads and resourcing, and manage freelance creatives when needed.
- Present and pitch
- Confidently present ideas and concepts to current and prospective partners.
- Lead on proposals and pitches from a Design perspective, taking ownership of the creative approach.
- Process and studio management
- Review and sign off work across the team, ensuring high standards are consistently met
- Fully manage your own workload and understand the workload of your team, working together with our Traffic Manager to keep to deadlines and budgets.
- Help improve and roll out creative processes to support team efficiency and quality.
- Ensure clarity of communication with internal teams about project progress.
- Leadership & Growth
- Help identify recruitment needs within the team and contribute to hiring processes.
- Support the implementation of our race equity and environmental strategies.
- Encourage the team to stay up to date with design trends and explore new tools and approaches including AI.
You’re exceptional at (role requirements):
- Design leadership – guiding your team to do their best work and maintaining creative excellence.
- Creative collaboration with partners, communities, and colleagues.
- Concept development – bringing original, audience-centred ideas to life.
- Translating conceptual ideas into compelling design solutions for brand identity and campaign assets across all channels and platforms
- Storytelling – presenting ideas clearly and emotionally to partners and audiences.
- Team mentorship – giving constructive feedback and fostering team growth.
- Studio management – managing tasks, timelines, budgets and internal comms.
- Cross-functional collaboration – working effectively with non-creative teams.
- Software proficiency – Adobe Suite (Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign), Canva, and willingness to learn new tools. Ideally, you are proficient in Figma, After Effects or Premier Pro and if not, demonstrate a good understanding here. You are committed to adopting AI to streamline processes.
- Eye for detail – catching the small things that make a big difference.
- Resilience & adaptability – the ability to juggle multiple projects at once, staying calm and focused under pressure or when plans shift with the ability to pivot where needed.
You bring:
- Experience in design roles.
- A deep understanding of branding, campaign work, and designing across digital and print.
- Previous agency experience, or the ability to manage a fast-paced, multi-project workload.
- Experience managing or mentoring designers.
- A collaborative mindset and willingness to roll up your sleeves during creative sprints.
- Experience managing or mentoring designers.
- A black book of creatives that you love working with.
Extra bit of awesome:
- What’s that, you say? You have a bank of relationships and contacts across brands and NGOs you can introduce Shape History?
- You have experience working in UX and UI design? You illustrate?
- Or sector-specific knowledge in the social impact/sustainability/charity/political sector?
- Oh, you speak another language?
Any and all of these things would be the icing on the cake.
Race Equity:
We are committed to having an inclusive culture in which everyone feels safe and supported to achieve their potential. There is a long way to go in implementing race equity in the sector and we have a robust strategy in place for delivering this at Shape History. We actively encourage applications from underrepresented and minority groups, including those with lived experience of social issues we are working to address.
Remuneration:
Up to £60K per year, depending on experience
Recruitment process:
- If this sounds like your kind of role, we’d love to hear from you.
- Applications close: Sunday 9th November at 6pm GMT
- Short tasks to be sent out to shortlisted candidates: w/c 10th November
- Tasks to be presented in an in-person London-based interview: w/c 17th November
When applying for this role, you will be taken to a Typeform link where you’ll be asked a series of questions.
