Senior Design Director

Position Overview:

A Senior Design Director conceives and guides the development of creative concepts for live experiences to effectively express the client’s brand and functional intent in the physical form. This role is the design leader that collaborates with a team to ensure quality, adherence to the client’s brand and explores concepts in a strategically viable way to shape the overall structural design approach.

Responsibilities:

• Performs as the design lead on multiple teams and highly complex projects, simulataneously. 
• Leads and mentors teams by demonstrating communication, team collaboration and presentation skills that are clear and compelling to all levels of internal and external stakeholders.
• Uses well-developed leadership qualities and demonstrates the ability to collaborate with other departments, divisions, and organizations. 
• Demonstrates clear and advanced conceptual design thinking, storytelling, and concept sketching skills.  
• Develops three-dimensional creative concepts and design solutions that align with project objectives and brand guidelines.
• Provides design direction and guidance to designers and other team members for large scale projects to ensure the physical elements effectively meet the client’s objectives.
• Reviews and approves final designs, contributes to and oversees design’s quality, ensures adherence to design intent and commitment to project schedules including timely and complete handoff to estimating and detailing teams.
• Acts as the main point of contact for clients regarding design decisions and addressing feedback and revisions throughout the project lifecycle.
• Has expert knowledge and skills in relevant software applications and tools.
• Decodes the design narrative and integrates the strategy into a cohesive design language, ensuring the conceptual designs are congruent with technical design, detailing, and innovative production techniques.

Qualifications: 

• Bachelor's degree in one of the following:        architecture, environmental design, retail design, interior design, industrial design, exhibit design or experiential design
• 15+ years of experience in event marketing, environmental design, and/or architecture
• Experience in 2D & 3D environments
• Familiarity with Adobe Suite software, 3D Studio Max, V-Ray, ACad, Sketchup or similar CAD software
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills

Company Overview:

Sparks is a live + digital brand experience agency. We specialize in creating connection–-real human connection–-onsite, online or anywhere. Through a mix of sound strategy, breakthrough creative and flawless execution, we create memorable trade show exhibits, live and virtual events, brand activations, retail stores, corporate environments and other immersive experiences that deepen relationships, inspire action, and build trust--and we do it all over the world. 

We operate an open and inclusive culture where all recognize, respect, appreciate and encourage individuality regardless of race, gender, age, religion, culture, ideology, economic status, disability or sexual orientation. We believe that everyone at all levels of our organization is accountable for building this culture and we are challenging ourselves daily to seek and build diversity and equality in any way that we can–and we welcome your ideas to do so. 

Think you’ve got what it takes to hang with us?

We’ve built our reputation on creating awesome experiences for our clients, but equally important is the experience we create for our people.  Yes, we work hard. But we also make it a point to have fun.  And we find our people work that much harder when work doesn’t feel so much like, well, work.  If you share our mindset, we should chat.

We’ve always got our eyes peeled for smart, hungry people who think that what we do isn’t so much a job as it is a way of life.  And while any company can supply stuff like benefits (and, of course we do too!) our greatest benefit comes from the amazing people you’ll interact with daily, who will challenge and push you to think harder, be more creative and love what you do.

Sparks provides equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants for employment and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any type without regard to race, color, religion, age, sex, national origin, disability status, genetics, protected veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state or local laws. This policy applies to all terms and conditions of employment, including recruiting, hiring, placement, promotion, termination, layoff, recall, transfer, leaves of absence, compensation and training.