Creative Director (Fractional)

Animalz • San Diego, CA

2d • $100 - $125 • Remote

About The Position

We're looking for a fractional Creative Director to lead the visual and creative strategy for our design services practice. You'll be the bridge between our customers' creative vision and the production work that brings it to life.

This is a strategic, customer-facing role, not a production role. You'll interface directly with customers and their creative teams to understand their brand, goals, and content needs. From there, you'll shape design briefs, define visual direction, and oversee a small team of freelance production designers who execute the work. You'll review their output to ensure it meets the standard—not just on-brand, but genuinely elevates the content.

We're building this function from the ground up, so you'll have real influence over how we structure creative workflows, onboard designers, and deliver design work that customers are excited about.

Requirements

• 5+ years of design experience, with meaningful time spent in a creative direction or design leadership role—ideally at an agency, studio, or in-house creative team serving B2B/tech customers
• Strong visual taste and range: You have a sharp eye and can work across brand identity, editorial/layout design, data visualization, and digital content formats (ebooks, slide decks, social graphics)
• Strategic thinking: You don't just make things look good; you understand why design choices matter for the audience, the brand, and the business goal
• Brief-writing and communication skills: You can distill a customer conversation into a clear creative brief that a designer can run with, and you can articulate design rationale to non-designers
• Experience managing designers: You've given feedback, set standards, and helped other designers grow, whether as a formal manager or a senior creative leading a team
• Customer-facing confidence: You're comfortable in customer meetings, can ask the right questions to uncover creative needs, and can present and defend creative direction
• Proficiency in Figma (primary tool) and familiarity with Adobe Creative Suite (Illustrator, InDesign, Photoshop)
• Reliability and responsiveness: Fractional doesn't mean sporadic. You're reachable, you hit deadlines, and you follow through
• Must have at least 4 hours of overlap with US timezones (EST/PST) for customer calls and team collaboration

Nice To Haves

• Experience with B2B SaaS brands or content marketing agencies
• Familiarity with AI design tools and how they can support (not replace) creative workflows
• Motion/animation skills (GIFs, basic animation) or ability to art-direct animation work
• Experience building or scaling a design practice or creative team from early stages

Responsibilities

• Lead creative strategy for customer accounts: Participate in kickoff calls and creative interviews with customers to understand their brand identity, visual goals, and content objectives
• Write and shape design briefs: Translate customer needs and content strategies into clear, actionable briefs that production designers can execute against
• Review and elevate production work: QA design deliverables before they reach the customer, ensuring visual quality, brand consistency, and creative ambition go beyond "just layout"
• Expand and refine customer brand systems: When customers lack the design assets or visual identity needed for production work, lead brand-level design initiatives (color palettes, typography systems, icon sets, illustration styles, brand guidelines)
• Manage and mentor production designers: Oversee 2+ freelance designers, providing clear feedback, establishing standards, and building a consistent creative process
• Advise on creative direction for data visualization: Help customers think beyond default charts and graphs.
• Guide the team toward more narrative, visually compelling ways to present data in reports, ebooks, and presentations
• Collaborate with content strategists: Work alongside Heads of Content and content marketers to ensure design and content reinforce each other
• Shape the design practice: Contribute to how we scope, price, and deliver design services as this part of the business grows

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Part-time
• Career Level: Mid Level
• Education Level: No Education Listed
• Number of Employees: 11-50 employees