Design Lead – Sports Brand

You've done your years in London, and you're tired of the Waterloo run.

We're a six-person B-Corp studio in Guildford looking for a Design Lead.  A senior, hands-on creative who can take an idea, elevate it, and drive it through to work we're all proud to put our name on. Small team, senior seat, no layers between you and the client.

A significant share of your time will be spent on a global sports brand moving into brand-first campaign work, brand guidelines, campaign toolkits, and regional and global rollouts. The rest is brand projects across our wider client base, plus creative on new business.

You'll work closely with our Executive Creative Director, and you'll direct our freelance bench of 2D, 3D, animation, film and photography specialists, setting the standard and holding the line on quality.

We're also early in our AI journey, building it into how we brief, research and produce. If that interests you, it's a good moment to join.

The role

• Leading creative direction across brand and campaign work
• Developing campaign ideas that work across multiple channels — social-first content through to print and environmental
• Building and evolving brand identities, visual systems, guidelines and campaign toolkits for regional and global rollout
• Directing our freelance bench, including film, video and photography direction and editing
• Quality-checking work to both creative and technical standards before it leaves the studio
• Presenting and defending work directly to clients
• Bringing creative thinking into pitches and new business alongside the ECD

What we're looking for

• Around 10+ years in an agency or studio, with time at senior or lead level
• A portfolio strong on both concept and craft, showing brand and campaign work — and evidence of consistency across volume, not only one-off showpieces
• Strong conceptual thinking: you generate original ideas rather than jumping straight to execution, and you can turn a complex brief into a clear creative narrative
• Brand strategy awareness, positioning, audiences, and connecting business objectives to creative solutions
• Fluency in social-first, platform-native campaign creative
• An exceptional eye for detail and strong typographic craft
• Confident with print artwork and production
• Experience briefing and directing freelancers
• Figma as your day-to-day, alongside advanced Adobe CS. Motion skills an advantage

A word on sport

A meaningful part of this role is racket sports — tennis in particular. We're not looking for a fan. We're looking for someone who can get properly under the skin of a subculture and make work that people inside it recognise as true. If that's tennis for you, brilliant. If you've done it with running, football, climbing, skate or music, we're just as interested.

What we offer

£62,000–£68,000 depending on experience, plus:

• Hybrid working from our Guildford studio
• 9–5. No evenings, no weekend heroics
• Structured personal development and training
• Pension scheme and salary sacrifice EV scheme
• Birthday day off and volunteer days
• Carbon reduction commitments and regular team culture days

As a B-Corp studio, we look for people who share our commitment to responsible, thoughtful ways of working.

Apply

Send your CV and a link to your portfolio to [email protected]

We value thoughtful, genuine applications that reflect your own experience and perspective, and tell us more about how you think than a polished, generic response.

We're committed to building a diverse and inclusive team, and we welcome applications from people of all backgrounds and experiences.