Senior Art Director, Brand

Car Max Enterprise Services, LLC is seeking a Senior Art Director, Brand to lead brand-elevating creative across channels and stores in Richmond, VA. In this onsite role, you will combine brand strategy, art direction, and design expertise while partnering with cross-functional teams to keep creative aligned to brand guidelines and strategic objectives.

In the Senior Art Director – Brand position, you will drive the creative vision and execution for projects that strengthen Car Max’s brand presence. The work includes leading ideation, shaping concepts into deliverables, and ensuring creative output meets channel needs, performance indicators, and business goals.

• Proactively contribute ideas to Brand Communications through brainstorming, inspiration gathering, trend identification, channel-specific approaches, and ways to bring the brand to life.
• Identify opportunities to evolve Car Max’s brand and communicate rationale to brand stakeholders.
• Support the development and ongoing maintenance of style guides and/or installation guides for relevant channels and stores.
• Lead brainstorming sessions to generate innovative and original project ideas, including understanding project goals and how deliverables fit within broader marketing strategy.
• Apply innovative art direction skills across visual design, branding, concept development, motion graphics, and design systems or layouts, accounting for channel needs, performance indicators, and business goals.
• Plan for campaign impacts related to GenAI, identify opportunities, build brand-appropriate templates that align with creative briefs for asset generation, and partner with teams to support delivery; invest time in learning AI proactively.
• Maintain advanced proficiency in creative tools, including evaluating opportunities and restrictions of technology and asset types, researching how tools can improve creative development and testing, and collaborating on a strategy to optimize creative based on insights.
• Capture and document content and asset recommendations from legal and others, including rationale, using shareable and editable formats and following established processes for tools and file saving or sharing.
• Source inspiration from digital sources, use found images, mocked-up imagery, and video to shape concepts, and refine and customize ideas to meet brand guidelines and platform needs.
• Promote projects and initiatives across organizational levels by clearly articulating point of view, showing creative thought process and rationale, and tailoring communication to the audience.
• Build and maintain strategic relationships across teams to align on objectives and contribute to team goals.
• Motivate and lead peers and business partners to embrace high-level creative that connects team goals to broader department goals.
• Seek creative feedback or ideas from partners and team members, and recognize when alternative ideas better serve the project and user needs.
• Balance creativity with execution through independent decision-making, critical thinking, and issue resolution while managing tight timelines and ambiguity.
• Lead multiple projects independently by managing timelines, deliverables, and team expectations with minimal oversight.
• Evaluate and question high-level strategic decisions to recommend improvements or enhance creative direction.
• Adapt to change quickly, adjusting to evolving requirements and managing transitions with minimal disruption.

• Bachelor’s degree in Graphic Design, Visual Arts, Digital Media, Advertising, or a related field, or equivalent professional experience in design and art direction.
• 5+ years of experience in art direction, branding, or a related creative role.
• Strong portfolio demonstrating…