Art Director

About Schaefer

At Schaefer Advertising, our purpose is simple:
Make Life Better.

That purpose guides everything we do. We believe great work starts with great people, strong relationships, and a culture that encourages curiosity, collaboration, and continuous growth.

For more than 30 years, we’ve helped organizations solve business problems through thoughtful strategy, strong creative, and lasting partnerships. We care deeply about our clients, our community, and each other. We believe the best ideas come from teams that trust one another and enjoy working together.

If you’re looking for a place where you can grow as a leader, make a meaningful contribution, and help shape the next chapter of a respected and established independent agency, we’d love to meet you.

Some agencies treat early-career creatives like extra hands. We don’t.

We’re looking for an Art Director / Designer who wants to contribute to the idea, not just execute someone else’s. Someone who can take a creative brief, understand the strategy, explore different ways into the problem, and help turn the strongest idea into work people notice.

You’ll work closely with our VP/Creative Director, Senior Art Director, Copywriters, Designers, Production Artist, account service, and production teams. You’ll be expected to bring ideas, ask good questions, make the work, take direction, and keep pushing until it is genuinely good.

This is an ideas-and-craft role for someone who wants to get better at both.

This is a highly hands-on role. You will concept, art direct, and design across brand campaigns, integrated advertising, environmental and out-of-home, digital, social, and motion—from early territory exploration through final execution.

You’ll help develop visual ideas, create campaign concepts, build presentations, design across channels, source and curate imagery, prepare production-ready files, and participate in photo and video production.

Some assignments will begin with a blank page and a creative brief. Others will require you to extend an established concept or visual system without losing what made it good. You should be energized by both.

You’ll have access to experienced creative leaders who will challenge you, support your development, and expect you to take increasing ownership of the work as your judgment grows.

Within your first 12 to 18 months, you will have:

• Become a trusted creative partner to our Senior Art Director, VP/Creative Director, Copywriters, Designers, and Production Artist.
• Contributed meaningful concepts and visual thinking to campaigns—not just executions.
• Demonstrated that you can connect your creative choices to the strategy in the brief.
• Taken increasing ownership of assignments from initial exploration through production-ready execution.
• Strengthened your art direction across typography, composition, imagery, photography, video, and channel-specific design.
• Learned to present your work clearly, hear feedback without becoming defensive, and return with a stronger solution.
• Developed the speed, consistency, and judgment required to handle both considered campaign work and fast-turn assignments.
• Brought useful new tools, techniques, or AI-assisted workflows into how we work and shared what you learned with the team.

• Translate creative strategy and well-built briefs into relevant, distinctive, and executable ideas.
• Develop multiple creative territories before narrowing in on the strongest solution.
• Concept and design campaigns across brand, integrated advertising, out-of-home, digital, social, motion, and environmental work.
• Think beyond a single execution. Consider how an idea can extend across channels, audiences, formats, and moments.
• Develop presentation-ready concepts that clearly connect the creative idea back to the strategy.
• Make thoughtful decisions about typography, composition, color, imagery, hierarchy, and detail.
• Design for the medium: legibility at highway speed, hierarchy in a feed, restraint on a wall, and clarity on a screen.
• Recognize when an idea is not there yet, let go of work that is not solving the problem, and go…