Art Director

About the role

Our creative studio is six people: two designers, two mid-weight art directors, a retoucher and a studio manager who keeps the whole thing from catching fire. They produce everything from a 48-sheet at Causeway Bay to a fifteen-second vertical cut-down, often from the same key visual.

We are hiring an Art Director to lead that group because the studio has outgrown being managed part-time by our Executive Creative Director. You will own craft standards, hold the line on typography — including Chinese typesetting, which almost nobody does well here — and be the person a junior can show a half-finished layout to at 6pm without dreading the answer.

This is a hands-on role. You will still design. Roughly sixty per cent of your week is on the tools, forty per cent is direction, feedback and sitting in front of clients.

What you'll do

• Art direct two to three concurrent campaigns from concept boards through to final artwork and delivery.
• Set and police craft standards across bilingual layouts — Latin and Chinese type pairing, line-breaking, and the vertical formats that eat every desktop-first design.
• Run daily crits with the studio and give feedback that is specific enough to act on before lunch.
• Work with the Strategy team so the visual idea carries the proposition rather than decorating it.
• Brief and supervise photographers, illustrators and retouchers; attend shoots and make the calls on set.
• Present creative to clients alongside the account lead and defend the work without becoming precious about it.

What we're looking for

• 7+ years in art direction or senior design, with at least three years in an agency or in-house brand studio in Hong Kong.
• A portfolio that shows integrated campaigns — not just beautiful stills — including at least one piece of bilingual Chinese/English work you designed end to end.
• Expert Adobe Creative Suite and Figma; comfortable preparing production-ready artwork for large-format print and OOH.
• Business-level Cantonese and English — you will brief a Cantonese-speaking printer in the morning and present to an English-speaking client in the afternoon.
• Demonstrable experience mentoring designers, with names of people whose work got better under you.

Nice to have

• Motion or After Effects literacy, enough to direct a motion designer properly.
• Experience with Chinese typeface licensing and the practical limits of web font delivery for 繁體中文.
• Illustration or lettering as a personal practice.

What you get

• 13th month salary paid before Lunar New Year
• 18 days annual leave plus your birthday off
• HK$8,000 annual craft budget — typefaces, books, courses, whatever makes the work better
• Medical and dental cover from day one
• Studio-funded gallery and design fair passes, including one overseas trip a year