Design Director

About Simple Truth

Simple Truth is a brand consultancy in our seventh year, working with property developers, charities, and businesses we believe in. We do strategic brand work, websites, and marketing campaigns. We started with a clear purpose: do great work that makes an impact, help businesses properly, and build a studio that isn't about ego. You'll be based in our studio in Spitalfields, in the middle of one of London's most creative neighbourhoods.

Our clients are genuinely varied, from purpose-led charities and challenger brands to cultural organisations and businesses in property and placemaking. Some relationships go back years; others are fast, focused project engagements. You'll need to be as comfortable in a room with a start-up founder as you are with a long-standing client, and adapt your approach accordingly.

We're at a point of real growth and we're looking for a Design Director to take genuine creative ownership, help shape how the studio operates, and become a trusted partner to clients and colleagues alike.

The Role

You'll be hands-on and client-facing, leading projects from brief to delivery. You'll work directly with the studio founder, help define creative direction, and play an active role in pitches and new business. This role is central to how the studio grows, and you'll have real influence over that.

• Lead creative direction across brand identity, digital and motion projects
• Be the senior creative voice in client meetings, including leading them independently when needed
• Manage and mentor the design team, raising the standard of output across the board
• Contribute to pitches, proposals and new business conversations
• Bring new tools, technologies and ways of working to the studio and get others using them
• Stay genuinely curious: about design, about culture, about what's coming next

What We're Looking For

Skills & Experience

• A true all-rounder, strong across brand identity, narrative, copy direction and digital/web; you understand that strong narrative is the foundation of a successful brand, and your work reflects that
• A strategic thinker who understands brand positioning and audience before picking up a pencil, and can translate that thinking into creative decisions that are easy to explain and hard to argue with
• Solid understanding of motion and how it fits within a brand system; you don't need to be a motion specialist, but you get it and can direct it
• An exceptional eye for photography, knowing what makes an image work and how to art direct, select and commission with confidence
• Confident leading creative conversations with clients; trusted enough to go it alone when needed
• Deeply curious about emerging tools, AI, new design technologies and evolving creative processes, and proactive about bringing them into the studio
• A natural eye for typography, layout and art direction
• Comfortable in Figma, Adobe Creative Suite, and whatever the work demands
• ·Experience or knowledge of the property and placemaking sector would be a plus, not essential, but it'll mean you hit the ground running with some of our longer-standing clients

Who You Are

• A senior creative ready to step into genuine leadership
• Someone who thinks strategically as well as creatively, and knows that the best work starts long before anyone opens Figma
• Someone who asks the right questions, goes beyond the brief, and brings ideas nobody asked for but everyone's glad you did, the kind of thinking that surprises and delights
• Collaborative by nature, feedback feels like a conversation, not a correction
• Optimistic and ambitious, with the self-awareness to be realistic about time and scope
• The kind of person who makes a room better just by being in it

What's on Offer

• £60,000 salary
• Real creative ownership, this isn't a figurehead role
• Direct relationship with the studio founder and genuine influence on the studio's direction
• A close-knit team who care about the work
• Variety, no two projects are the same

The Reality

You'll be stepping into a studio that's been built on founder energy, strong relationships, and good creative instincts. The work is genuinely varied and the clients are interesting. But we're a small team, which means you'll need to be comfortable leading and doing, sometimes in the same afternoon.

If you:

• Get energy from creative collaboration, not just creative control
• Are as comfortable in a client meeting as you are in Figma
• Want to genuinely shape a studio's direction, not just execute someone else's vision
• Bring curiosity and enthusiasm to everything, including the stuff nobody asked you to think about

This could be exactly the right move.