Associate Design Director

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.