Production Design Lead

The Production Design Lead is responsible for leading and overseeing the execution of production design solutions like image assets, display, and social media banner resizes, digital layout refreshments, and digital template creation in one account or group of small accounts and ensures that these solutions meet business requirements and goals. Reporting to the Production Design Manager, the Production Design Lead must work with and lead a team of production specialists. 

 You will:

• Supervise and provide direction to team members to ensure deliverables meet standards. These deliverables include (but are not limited to) layout skinning, layout production, red lines, image asset creation, image optimization, image resizes & cropping, photo retouching & photomontage, animated and static online advertising banners and emails production, decks and visual guidelines creation.  
• Understand, analyze, and respond to client production requests.  
• Develop estimates, direct proper casting for production design projects, and contribute to project allocation. 
• Work closely with development Leads to ensure that design specifications are implemented.  
• Provide reliable quality assurance on all production design deliverables. 
• Manage day-to-day communications with stakeholders, partners, clients, and offshore teams. Actively participates, leads calls and client meetings, and handles IM and e-mail communication. Presents work during client presentations.  
• Manage the success of a production scope, partnering with producers to ensure deadlines are met on schedule and budget. Anticipates issues and flags situations that might impact quality or delivery success.  
• Collaborate with other disciplines to improve workflows and frameworks to ensure project success with client and user satisfaction. 
• Participate in recruiting and hiring department team members, interviewing candidates, and collaborating with HR.  
• Manages and designs departmental processes, including performance management, career paths, and design quality standards.  
• Mentors and coach team members through project development and performance management.  
• Fosters excellence, learning, and a collaborative and positive environment among team members. 
• Contributes to the department's innovative development. 
• Stays up to date with the latest design trends, systems, tools, technologies and platforms while fostering excellence, learning, and a collaborative environment among team members

You have:

• Advanced English Proficiency (B2+/C1 reading, writing, and conversation)
• 6+ yrs. Experience in advertising agencies, digital agencies, design agencies, and/or startups.  
• Experience leading projects and teams on production design, site/app maintenance, digital marketing, digital animation and print areas, preferably for international clients and global brands. 
• Extensive experience with campaign development and digital product execution. 
• Extensive experience creating assets for digital products.  
• Experience designing and implementing production design processes and standards with a strategic approach. 
• Experience managing and designing departmental processes including performance management, career paths and quality standards.  
• Experience managing production design scopes, taking into account project schedule and budget.  
• Solid understanding of digital marketing, online advertising and business strategy concepts.  
• Solid understanding of interactivity and animation principles and best practices.  
• Solid understanding of design principles, trends, systems.  
• Extensive knowledge of Adobe Creative Suite (Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign).  
• Extensive knowledge of Keynote, PowerPoint
• Knowledge of After Effects and Adobe Animate.  
• Strong knowledge of productivity tools: MS Office (Word, Excel, Outlook),  
• Knowledge of remote collaboration tools (Slack, Zoom, Drive, Box, Paper, Evernote) and workflow management tools (Jira, Trello, Asana, Basecamp).
• Knowledge of UI design tools (Figma, Adobe XD, Sketch).  
• Knowledge of HTML5 animation principles.  
• Familiar with CMS and frameworks such as: Bootstrap, Foundation, Wordpress, AEM.  
• Familiar with OA platforms such as: Celtra, Sizmek, DoubleClick, Flash Talking. 
• Bachelor's degree in Graphic Design, Visual Design Advertising Design or related field or equivalent experience in advertising and digital agencies or startups.  

What We Offer:

• Maternity and parental leave extra days
• Competitive benefits packages
• Vacation, compassionate leave, sick days, and flex days
• Access to online services for families and new parents
• End of year closure days (not deducted form vacation balance)
• Diversity and Inclusion Board with 12 affinity groups
• Internal learning and development programs
• Enterprise-wide employee discounts
• And more…

At Critical Mass, we value our employees and offer competitive compensation and benefits packages.  If you’re looking for a challenging and rewarding opportunity to make a significant impact on the lives of our employees, we encourage you to apply for this exciting position today!

The Talent Team at Critical Mass is focused on ensuring we provide the best training, onboarding, and employee experience possible! Our new hires & employees are the future of our organization, and we want to set you up for long-term success. In an effort to do so, we expect our team to work from an office a minimum of 3 days a week.

The ask stems from our want to:

Strengthen opportunity for continuous learning
Improve collaboration and team relationships.
Increase employee engagement

This working model balances the need for individual flexibility while maintaining the relentless customer focus we provide at CM. We understand that not everyone may feel comfortable with this expectation, so we ask that you please let us know immediately if there are any concerns so we can help navigate accordingly.