Art Director

Zünc Studio is seeking a London-based Art Director with 3+ years experience in CGI. The Art Director works to translate the studio's vision into daily execution, managing the design team on projects and communicating with clients throughout the day. You help to lead and elevate the work, and put it all together - if designers make the tyres, engine, chassis, seats and steering, your job is to make the car. We’re a small team working with some of the world’s biggest brands in luxury and beauty, and our dream AD gets the best out of designers and clients alike.

QUALITIES

How we’d describe the ideal candidate:

• Bigger picture - you think about the campaign in its wider context (a film, an experience, an editorial…). You care deeply about your own contribution while staying emotionally distanced enough to serve the whole. Ground-to-cloud-thinker.
• Highly organised - you bring order into a project and help everyone else stay organised. You fight unnecessary complexity and entropy, and you can run multiple projects at once.
• Visual language fluency - you naturally think in images. You can read and write across space (composition, shape, light, and what they mean) and across time (motion, editing, pacing, how a shot builds into a scene, a sequence, a film).
• Proactive communicator - inside the studio, you keep healthy velocity across the design team, and you’re comfortable setting goals and milestones that feel slightly uncomfortable. Externally with clients, you craft and confidently present compelling decks to stakeholders, with a host’s attention to how they’re received.
• Taste and judgement - your portfolio reflects the values we care about too. You care about timeless mastery more than the latest trends. Strong opinions, loosely held is our motto.
• Asks the right questions - how, when, why, who and what - with a proven track record of finding the right answers.
• On the tools - you’re happy to be hands on or hands off depending on the size of a project (main tools Cinema4D, Octane and After Effects)
• Experience - proficiency and 3+ years of experience across CGI is non-negotiable, ideally at a similar position (full-time) with proven experience directing a team.

RESPONSIBILITIES

As Zünc’s Art Director, your key responsibilities are to:

• Own the whole project - you take responsibility to shape the visual direction of projects, meet deadlines and quality standards across the entire thing.
• Translate the Creative Director's vision to help direct the work, while also challenging and evolving ideas along the way.
• Be the person accountable for managing the design team throughout the day, making sure they stay on track, and giving feedback to improve their outputs.
• Align the team’s effort toward a shared goal by setting guidelines to help the team understand both the desired direction and the constraints.
• Create urgency with the team to meet deadlines and push the quality of our outputs.
• Interpret client feedback, brief the team, and provide the necessary context.
• Lay projects out on Miro - progress, references, to-dos - and keep everyone else organised alongside you.
• You create the skeleton of a project - owning the structural elements such as layouts, animatic, edit and key references/styleframes.
• Stay on the lookout for new ideas to present smart solutions and innovative concepts
• Use your opinion, taste, judgement and inherent knowledge of visual language, rather than solely working with references
• Work directly in 3D where it’s useful for communication - e.g. quickly blocking out a scene rather than polishing it. Depending on project size, you may or may not be making shots start to finish.
• Put together decks on Figma to share with clients, deciding what to include and writing simple but clear contextual text to accompany images.
• Assist with client communications, participating on calls, presenting decks, staying in the loop on email, sharing files.
• Own quality control on every project leaving the studio.

We’re an independently owned studio making work for world-class brands across luxury, fashion and cosmetics, driven by a pursuit of mastery, continuous learning, autonomy and knowledge sharing. We keep things flat and open: everyone gets a go at every stage of a project, gives and asks for honest feedback, and has time set aside to experiment and teach each other. We work together to push the work to be incredible, and we celebrate the wins together too, with team dinners, the odd company-funded trip and special events that get us into a creative and competitive spirit (enquire within)...

JUNIORS

• If you have CGI experience but have no experience leading a team, then we may consider hiring you as a Junior AD. If the job described above is something you can imagine yourself growing in to, and you have the right qualities to make for an amazing AD, we'd love to hear from you.