Senior Art Director, Brand

As the Senior Art Director – Brand
, you will drive the creative vision and execution of compelling creative that elevates our brand and engages audiences. This role blends strategy, branding, and design expertise to produce high-quality assets across brand channels and stores. This role is ideal for a creative thinker who thrives in a fast-paced environment, can pivot quickly, and brings a strong blend of conceptual and strategic creative skills.

Whether designing brand assets, creating brand and/or installation guidelines, or refining brand messaging, you will play a key role in shaping engaging brand assets that resonate with audiences across multiple platforms. Reporting to the Associate Creative Director on the Brand team, you will collaborate closely with cross-functional teams, ensuring that creative executions align with strategic objectives and brand guidelines.

• Proactively contributes ideas to the practice of Brand Communications (brainstorms, inspiration gathering, identifying appropriate trends, channel-specific approaches, and ways to bring our brand to life).
• Recognizes opportunities to evolve Car Max's brand. Can articulate rationale to brand stakeholders.
• Contributes to the development and maintenance of style guides and/or installation guides for respective channels and stores.
• Leads brainstorming sessions to come up with innovative and original ideas for projects. Understands project goals and how deliverables fit within the broader marketing strategy.
• Leads with innovative thinking and art direction skills in visual design, branding, concept development, motion graphics, and design systems/layouts. Able to confidently navigate how channel needs, performance indicators, and business goals impact the work.
• Understanding of how GenAI impacts planning for campaigns and the ability to identify opportunities. Build brand-appropriate templates that meet creative briefs for the generation of assets and work with teams to facilitate delivery. Proactively invest time in learning AI.
• Advanced proficiency in creative tools. A clear understanding of opportunities and restrictions of the tech and asset types and AI/brand best practices. Researches how tools can be used to enhance the creative development and testing process. Collaborates with the manager to develop a strategy for optimizing creative based on insights gained.
• Captures and documents content/asset recommendations from legal and elsewhere and rationale in an easily shareable/editable format. Follows established processes, tools, and file saving/sharing.
• Contributes to brainstorms, proactively sources inspiration from a wide range of digital sources, effectively using found images, mocked-up imagery, and video to shape and support creative concepts. Refines and customizes ideas, integrating inspiration into original work that fits brand guidelines and platform needs.
• Promotes projects and initiatives effectively to various levels of the organization, articulating POV by showing creative thought process and rationale. Communicates clearly and effectively, tailoring the message to the audience.
• Builds and maintains strategic relationships across teams, actively engaging with others to align on objectives and contribute to team goals.
• Successfully motivates and leads peers and business partners to embrace high level creative that connects team goals with larger department goals.
• Seeks creative feedback or ideas from partners/team; recognizes when other ideas will better serve the project/user.
• Thinks critically to balance creativity and execution, making informed decisions independently while managing tight timelines and navigating ambiguity. Able to address issues…