Creative Director, Brand & Packaging

Propelis • Chicago, IL

3d • $150,000 - $160,000 • Hybrid

About The Position

Marks is a consumer experience agency creating engaging moments across the entire brand spectrum—from brand design and packaging to content and consumer connections. Rooted in a deep understanding of human behavior, we help brands win in an age of constant change. We are a global, collaborative network of 1,900+ team members across 25+ studios and 20+ countries, partnering with some of the world’s most recognized brands to solve complex business challenges through design, strategy, and craft.

As Creative Director, Brand & Packaging Design, you’ll lead the creation and evolution of brand systems that are strategically sharp, creatively distinctive, and built to thrive in the real world. You bring deep expertise in brand identity and packaging design, but your thinking doesn’t stop at the pack. You understand how an idea becomes a connected brand experience across packaging, retail, digital, social, content, campaigns, and beyond.

You’ll set the creative vision, lead multidisciplinary teams, and partner closely with Strategy and Client Services to turn business challenges into powerful creative opportunities. You’ll guide projects from early strategic thinking through design development, production, and activation—ensuring the original idea gets stronger, not diluted, as it comes to life.

You’re a confident client partner, an inspiring team leader, and a champion of exceptional craft. You know when to challenge, when to listen, and how to bring people together around a clear creative vision.

Requirements

• 12+ years of progressive experience in brand and packaging design, including significant creative leadership experience.
• A standout portfolio demonstrating brand creation, identity systems, CPG packaging, and broader brand activation across channels.
• Deep expertise in packaging and a sophisticated understanding of how brands operate across the consumer journey.
• Proven experience leading multidisciplinary creative teams and developing senior creative talent.
• Strong strategic instincts and the ability to connect business, consumer, and brand objectives to creative solutions.
• Exceptional presentation and visual storytelling skills, with experience leading senior-level client conversations.
• Strong understanding of packaging production, photography, CGI, content creation, and the realities of bringing creative ideas to market.
• Fluency in Adobe Creative Suite and presentation tools; curiosity and fluency with emerging creative technologies.

Nice To Haves

• You are a brand thinker with a designer’s eye and a leader’s mindset.
• You can look at a business challenge and see the bigger brand opportunity.
• You understand packaging as one of the most powerful expressions of a brand.
• You can envision how that same brand idea comes alive everywhere else.
• You have a strong creative point of view without needing to be the person who has every idea.
• You know how to recognize great thinking, make it better, and build consensus around it.
• You are energized by complexity: different categories, different channels, different disciplines, and different personalities.
• You bring clarity to all of it.
• Above all, you care deeply about the idea, the craft, and the people making it.

Responsibilities

• Set and champion the creative vision for brands across identity, packaging, and the broader consumer experience.
• Translate strategy, consumer insight, culture, and business objectives into distinctive creative ideas and brand systems.
• Think beyond individual executions to create ownable, scalable brand worlds with clear principles for how they behave.
• Protect the core idea from concept through execution, ensuring creative integrity across every expression of the brand.
• Know when to preserve brand equity, when to evolve it, and when to challenge conventions entirely.
• Lead the creation of holistic brand systems designed to work across packaging, retail, shopper, digital, social, content, campaigns, and emerging channels.
• Bring deep expertise in CPG and packaging design, including portfolio architecture, shelf impact, consumer navigation, and the realities of bringing packaging to market.
• Guide teams in translating core brand equities into flexible visual and verbal systems.
• Connect the right disciplines and specialists from strategy and copy to photography, CGI, motion, production, and engineering, to build richer brand experiences.
• Ensure systems are both creatively ambitious and practical enough to scale.
• Serve as a trusted creative authority and senior partner to clients.
• Lead presentations, workshops, and creative conversations with clarity, confidence, and a compelling point of view.
• Understand the client's business deeply enough to challenge briefs, reframe problems, and identify opportunities beyond the immediate ask.
• Navigate feedback constructively, balancing client objectives with consumer needs and creative ambition.
• Partner with Strategy and Client Services to shape stronger briefs, approaches, and creative narratives.
• Lead and inspire multidisciplinary creative teams, establishing clear direction while creating space for others to do their best work.
• Develop Designers, Design Directors and other creative roles through coaching, feedback, and meaningful ownership.
• Lead creative reviews that sharpen ideas, resolve ambiguity, and move the work decisively forward.
• Maintain a high bar for conceptual thinking, storytelling, design craft, and execution.
• Create a culture of curiosity, accountability, generosity, and creative ambition.
• Stay close enough to the work to recognize when it needs intervention and roll up your sleeves when your contribution can meaningfully elevate the outcome.
• Champion new technologies and ways of working that improve how creative ideas are developed, explored, and delivered.
• Drive thoughtful adoption of AI-assisted creative workflows to expand exploration, accelerate visualization, and reduce low-value friction without replacing creative thinking, judgment, or craft.
• Encourage experimentation while helping establish responsible standards and best practices.
• Continuously look for opportunities to make the creative process smarter, faster, and more ambitious.
• Partner with Client Services and creative leadership to align creative ambition with scope, timing, resources, and business realities.
• Recognize opportunities to deepen client relationships and proactively bring forward ideas that create value beyond the brief.
• Play a meaningful creative leadership role in pitches, proposals, and new business.
• Collaborate across Marks disciplines, studios, and capabilities to bring the best of the agency to each challenge.
• Contribute to the creative reputation, culture, and continued evolution of Marks.

Benefits

• selection of health care plans with prescription drug coverage
• dental plan
• vision plan
• basic and supplemental life insurance
• a flexible spending account for medical and dependent care expenses or a health savings account based on plan selection
• short/long term disability
• 401(k) Savings Plan

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: No Education Listed