Art Director (12-month contract) - Japan

Job Description

Join the team redefining how the world experiences design.

Hey, hello, hiya, g'day, mabuhay, kia ora, 你好, hallo, vítejte, こんにちは!

Thanks for stopping by. We know job hunting can be a little time consuming and you're probably keen to find out what's on offer, so we'll get straight to the point.

Where and how you can work

Our headquarters is in sunny Sydney, Australia, but our team spans the globe. While we support flexible, remote-friendly ways of working, for this role we’re focusing on Tokyo, Japan. So we can best support our teams and keep collaboration flowing.

What you’ll do (responsibilities)

• Create a range of fresh, varied and beautiful designs for our Japan community

• Develop unique concepts for templates across themes and topics that resonate in Japan

• Design supporting assets — illustrations and design elements — that make templates shine

• Suggest new design styles and creative directions that fit what local users want

• Review Creator template submissions and give clear, actionable feedback that lifts quality and keeps everything on-brand

• Use AI tools to create templates at scale for the Japan market, without compromising craft or cultural relevance

• Write Creator briefs that give clear direction, context and inspiration, so Creators can do their best work

• Partner with the Design Lead to manage PPO designers — keeping work on track, on-brief and shipping on deadline

Qualifications

What we're looking for

• Experience as an Art Director, a Graphic Designer or a Visual Designer across digital and print marketing

• A genuine love for design trends and styles specific to Japan

• A portfolio that shows your passion for clean, elegant, beautiful design

• Strong craft in hand illustration, typography, colour, conceptual graphic design and layout

• A sharp eye for visual, cultural and pop culture trends

• A strong stylistic point of view, grounded in design fundamentals

• You design with the end user in mind, and deliver great work on deadline and to brief

• You've given design feedback before — and you know how to make it clear, kind and useful

• You're comfortable using AI tools in your design workflow, and curious about pushing them further

• You can write a tight creative brief that sets other designers up for success

• You've helped coordinate or guide a small group of designers before (or you're excited to step into that)

When applying to this role, please provide the following:

• Your resume

• A link to your portfolio 

Additional Information

About the Group/Team

Our marketplace of templates provides the perfect place for our users to begin their design journey. The Canva team wants to work with talented designers from across the world, to redefine what’s possible for a template - creating a new benchmark for fresh, high-quality design content within our collection. We're aiming to build the world’s best design marketplace, with a library of designs that offer our users a wide variety of usable and dynamic content - and to do that, we need the help of talented designers that can create amazing content.

About the Role/Specialty

Canva's on a mission to democratise design, and localisation is a big part of that. It's not enough to translate content from English — we want every market to have templates that reflect their own design aesthetics and trends. Working closely with copywriters, illustrators, market growth and localisation specialists, you'll oversee the end-to-end rollout of the Japan content library.

This role goes beyond designing templates yourself. You'll also shape what our external Creators make — writing clear Creator briefs, reviewing their template submissions, and using AI to create templates at scale for the Japan market. You'll partner with the Design Lead to help manage our PPO designers, keeping work aligned, on-brief and on-time.