Technical Art Director

Tavern Research•Chicago, IL

8d•$127,000 - $147,300

About The Position

This is a senior creative role with real ownership. You’ll establish Tavern’s visual standard across every ad, video, and deliverable we ship, and you’ll build the systems that let a small team produce work at the volume and quality our clients pay for. Most of our creative pipeline starts with AI-generated drafts. Your job is to define what “good” looks like, then encode that standard into tooling that governs on-screen text rendering, color grading, transitions, graphic treatments, and the broader visual practices that keep our output consistent. You’ll partner closely with engineers to turn your creative judgment into generalizable, scalable code. Day to day, you’ll move between hands-on creative work and systems building. You’ll cut and polish ads that clients are spending real money to put in front of voters. This role is structured as a fixed-term contract through the end of the 2026 cycle, with strong potential to convert to a permanent position based on fit and business needs. We’re looking for someone who’s ready to make an impact from day one and grow with us.

Requirements

5+ years of experience in video production, visual design, art direction, or comparable creative roles. Your portfolio should show work that performed, not just work that won awards.
Deep fluency in video post-production: color grading, finishing, and quality standards. Whether that comes from hands-on editing experience or directing AI-generated output to a polished standard, you know what good looks like and can get there.
Working familiarity with at least one programming language (Python, JavaScript, or TypeScript). You don’t need to be an engineer, but you need to be comfortable reading and maintaining code.
Demonstrated heavy use of AI tools in creative workflows, with a clear point of view on what works and what doesn’t
Strong instincts around layout, typography, visual hierarchy, motion, and pacing
Track record of building templates, style systems, or scalable creative frameworks. Bonus if any of it lived in code.
Comfortable managing scope, timelines, and revisions
Able to collaborate with engineers as a peer: informing product decisions, troubleshooting limitations, and translating design needs into actionable technical feedback
Political, advocacy, or campaign experience strongly preferred. You should understand what makes a political ad work and be able to articulate why.

Responsibilities

Write and maintain technical creative brief files that codify our approach to on-screen text, color grades, transitions, graphic treatments, and visual best practices. The goal: consistent, high-quality output across the whole team.
Direct AI-generated creative drafts to a finished, persuasive standard, and continuously improve the prompts, references, and pipelines that produce them
Partner with engineers to translate creative judgment into shared infrastructure: components, templates, and tooling that scale
Build and maintain the creative asset library: templates,, fonts, and brand elements
Create original data visualizations and graphics that translate research findings into clear, persuasive visuals
Collaborate with researchers and strategists to bring polling and content-testing insights to life visually
Mentor and raise the bar for other creatives on the team, formally or informally, as the team grows