Creative Lead

We’re ready to welcome a kind, ambitious, creative leader into our full-time studio team, to help steward varied brand communication projects. You’ll be joining the full-time creative department at Lovers, slotting into a senior position between our founder & ECD, and our mid-level creative strategist, surrounded also by two production colleagues and our wider Lovers collective. We’ll rely on you to help Lovers drive the development of head-turning, smile-raising outcomes across diverse projects with clients like Warner Music, Alexandra Palace, Badoo, Greenpeace and My/Mochi Ice Cream. You’ll also help find our next clients.

Lovers is a relatively new creative model (in our seventh year), driven by collective creative power. Entrepreneurial and collaborative, our company is about mastering the art of creative collaboration, tactfully enlisting designers, copywriters, strategists, researchers, photographers, illustrators, filmmakers, animators and others from the Lovers group. Handpicking and guiding project-specific teams, your role is about instructing and stewarding their talents in tune with project vision, co-authoring creative direction, so we can provide clients with ambitious, useful, emotive and memorable creative work we all believe in.

This is a really unique invitation for a visionary ‘people person’ who wants to grow their collaborative powers, connections and creative leadership skills, building on past experience. You’ll be shown the inner workings and methodology of our model and business, asked to help propel it bravely forwards. Relying on strong creative leadership abilities, you’ll become a key Lovers representative and creative role model amongst peers, inspiring seasoned collaborators, and coaching the less experienced to greatness.

Between creative projects for clients, you’ll also help curate extracurricular initiatives, including our playspace, Pillow Talk and Lovers get-togethers. You’ll actively recruit new members into the group tool. Above all, you’ll provide the strong creative leadership our projects and clients require.

The role in detail

The work we make at Lovers is all about helping brands express themselves with great thought and effort, across a range of outcomes. Our output falls into three camps: branding (creation of a brand), campaigns (helping a brand express something important) and key comms (designing flagship pieces of brand comms from websites to window displays). We only help organisations we want to see thrive.

You’ll join our passionate, lovely central team, sharing responsibility for leading and orchestrating the wider Lovers collective. As creative lead it’s your job to figure out what our best creative solution could be to a project brief, articulating this vision in a compelling way continually, and working collaboratively to realise it, supported by your fellow leaders in the Lovers studio.

Our varied projects will immerse you in diverse and fascinating subjects. So far we’ve delved into music, dating, clothing, theatre, art, entertainment, dance, technology, sex, death, film, food, education, music, child protection and environmental justice. This is always changing and growing, and you’ll actively help identify and win our next round of projects too. Our work is multidisciplinary, so you may find yourself co-creating brand identity systems, tone of voice, campaigns, adverts, printed books, digital tools, spatial elements like signage and way finding, and more.

Many ideas will start with you, but you’ll constantly be dreaming about which comrades you want to enlist to help develop and execute projects with you. You’ll have the support of our experienced founder and creative director, our creative strategist, our head of production and our creative producer — friendly, nurturing people who want you to succeed. You’ll have direct contact with clients and responsibility for helping clients feel super-confident in you, Lovers, and the work we’re delivering.

Here’s a list of specific things you’ll need to perform well in this role:

Hard skills:

• Brand strategy (an understanding of what makes great brands work, and how brands can be better)
• Creative direction for brand communication projects, across a range of sectors
• Design direction including evident flare for controlling look and feel, design, typography, colour etc
• Concepting ability, a knack for coming up with relevant, original and exciting ideas
• Writing ability, including an understanding of brand tone of voice and copywriting, even if not a ‘writer’
• Commissioning skills, such as commissioning designers, illustrators, animators, writers etc
• Presenting ability, compelling presentation-building and in-person / remote presentation flare
• Management skills, both in terms of team mates and projects to a high standard (staying in tune with project budgets, schedules and demands)
• An ability to elicit emotional response in brand communication work, with audiences
• Client relations experience, an ability to build trust, rapport and belief with clients
• Problem solving skills, at a team and work level

Soft skills:

• Positive, Idealistic outlook. We use this every single day.
• Determination. We work hard, then go home usually on time.
• Perceptiveness. Noticing things, more keenly than most.
• Foresight. Thinking ahead to help projects run smoothly.
• Interrogating briefs. Digesting and unpacking challenges.
• Scoping projects. Forming ideas about how you want projects to run.
• Imaginative thinking. Having ideas that are relevant and exciting.
• Identifying collaborators. Figuring out who to bring on board.
• Brilliant briefing. Instructing your colleagues clearly and fairly.
• Bringing the best out of people. That’s key to creative leadership.
• Building proposals. Designing and writing killer presentations.
• Making friends. Constantly, with clients, with collaborators.
• Communicating. Speaking and writing warmly and clearly.
• Professionalism. Being on point, on time, on budget.
• Pro-active Instinct. We’re often inventing and improvising.
• Cultural awareness. We’re sensitive to the world around us.
• Design & Art Direction fluency. Your native tongue, including Adobe.
• Strategic interest. Strategy is something that interests you.
• Presenting skills. Responsibly presenting and explaining work.

Here are some strands of experience you’ll need to draw and build upon:

• Developing compelling brand identities and communications. Essential experience.
• Briefing collaborators. You’ve instructed and involved people in your work before.
• Thinking for yourself. You've got some confidence as a self-starter.
• Guiding work to greatness. You can usually spot what a piece of work needs next.
• Multidisciplinary working. You’ll be fluent across a range of brand communication disciplines
• Developing concepts. You know how to shape an idea, from hazy to clear.
• Pitching ideas. You know how to present ideas in a clear, compelling way.
• Navigating feedback. You can listen carefully, negotiating the best path forwards.
• Commissioning assets. For example; photography, illustrations, sound, film.
• Running personal projects. You make time to follow personal creative passions.

About you

We’ve deliberately written this job description to make sure it’s not asking you to ‘be’ any particular type of person, so if you feel you could do the job (or learn to do it) then please consider applying, whoever you are. We are an equal opportunities employer. Lovers is a place for all talented creative people, regardless of background. Here are some traits you might recognise in yourself:

What really gets you out of bed in the morning is a natural excitement to get on with the creative project(s) you’re working on, so you can progress them to specialness. Mixing playful, lateral thinking with high design standards, you care deeply about design, typography, how things look, sound, feel. You also care about words, colours, images. You’re a sensitive noticer of all kinds of details, and you balance your exceptionally high standards with a mature flexibility towards client feedback and project constraints.

Rather than try to do everything yourself, you’re excited to involve others and you like making new friends. You’re a thoughtful person that puts effort into collaborating fairly and intelligently with those around you. People like working with you. You love to learn and grow. You enjoy trying to achieve new things, breaking new ground. Most importantly, you’re a creative leader, and teams can rely on you.

With 6-10 years of experience in professional brand communication, you’re ready to open up your working approach to become increasingly collaborative and multidisciplinary, realising ideas with other great people. You want to be somewhere you can be supported to achieve amazing results for amazing clients. You’d also love to help a great company grow, learning how to help a creative business blossom. You’re ready to be challenged.

About Lovers

We’re an ever-strengthening company of designers and creatives who want to work on projects that feel good, for organisations we respect. We want our industry to do less harm to the people in it and to the world around it, so we’re on a mission to build a new and different creative supergroup model and methodology geared towards only making thoughtful, effortful creative work that feels great. This model combines a clever central team with a diverse and inspiring collective of individuals with an array of talents, interests and personalities.

Some of our most well-known work includes the rebranding of Alexandra Palace, the Royal Court theatre and Green Man festival, international communication campaigns for Greenpeace, advertising and brand development for My/Mochi Ice Cream. In the past two years we’ve invited more commercial (yet equally inspiring) companies into our client base, including Allbirds, Warner Music, Nike, dating app Badoo. The golden thread running through all of our work is a passionate belief that we’re helping a brand move forward in a big way, and that we’re making work we (and the brand) are very excited about and proud of.

Our work is what happens when super-talented, motivated people work together on projects they care about. There’s not really an aesthetic style at Lovers, but there is a consistent ‘energy’ to the work. It’s hard to define but we think it’s something to do with ingredients like playful creative thinking, deep belief in creative processes, a hope to never be dull or expected, an appetite to engage people’s emotions and use words in interesting ways, and a loving care and attention towards craft details, with the appetite for a theatrical or uplifting touch. We want you to add to this Lovers ‘way’, evolving and defining it with us.