Creative Design Lead

Overview

This Role is 100% Remote

Salary Range: $95-105K

Aquent Studios is seeking a Design Lead to join our embedded studio supporting a leading aerospace and defense organization. In this role, you’ll be the strategic creative lead for an assigned business unit—guiding concept development, elevating brand expression, and ensuring that every deliverable aligns with mission-driven goals and strict brand standards.

This is an exceptional opportunity to influence high-impact work, partner with top-tier creative and marketing teams, and help shape communications that may support critical national security programs.

 What You’ll Do

Creative Leadership

• Serve as the primary creative and brand point of contact for an assigned business or business area.
• Provide creative direction across projects of varying complexity and channels.
• Partner with business stakeholders to define creative strategy and refine project briefs including scope.
• Facilitate brainstorming and creative kickoffs with designers, writers, approved vendors and other business groups.
• Ensure all creative outputs meet project goals, client expectations and brand standards.

Project Execution & Quality

• Present creative concepts to partners and clearly communicate revisions to the project team.
• Work with the internal Creative team and/or external partners to establish clear expectations and resource needs.
• Develop sketches, mockups or applied layouts to guide visual direction.
• Execute high-level strategic projects from start to finish, while supporting additional assignments as needed.
• Provide brand and creative quality control prior to requester or partner reviews.
• Maintain project communication and approvals using Workfront (WF).

Partnership & Collaboration

• Build strong relationships with the Communications and Integrated Marketing teams.
• Partner effectively with the Aquent Studios support team dedicated to the account.
• Ensure brand consistency across all deliverables; act as a brand ambassador for the client.
• Select and collaborate with approved vendors, ensuring quality and alignment with project requirements.
• Support your primary business unit with the flexibility to assist other teams as needed.

 What You Bring

• Proven experience in creative direction, brand management and art direction—preferably in complex, technical, or regulated industries.
• A strong portfolio demonstrating conceptual development, visual storytelling, and multi-channel creative leadership.
• Excellent communication and presentation skills, with the ability to engage senior stakeholders.
• Ability to manage multiple projects and maintain exceptional attention to detail.
• Highly skilled in Adobe Creative Suite and Microsoft Powerpoint in a Windows environment.
• Ensure resource alignment according to client expectations, content scope, and final deliverables, leveraging existing resources or independently executing the full project lifecycle as needed.
• Experience collaborating with cross-functional teams and external vendors.
• Familiarity with Workfront (WF) is a plus.

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