Director, Brand Design

Brand Director As Brand Director, you'll lead with vision, craft, and strategy, shaping how brands show up across every digital and physical touchpoint. Building on Parallel's reputation for design, you'll own the creative direction and strategic development of brand experiences that resonate with people, move the business, and expand what a brand can be in a digital-first world. As a director, you'll pair thought leadership with hands-on mentorship. You'll create the conditions for teams to do their best work, and make sure every brand we touch carries clarity, creativity, and craft. What You'll Do Lead the work • Define the vision for brand design at Parallel and raise our brand practice to a new level of creative excellence. • Guide and mentor brand designers at every level, through the whole journey from insight to identity to expression. • Partner with clients strategically, helping founders and executives shape, evolve, and scale their brands for a digital-first world. • Build and refine brand systems that carry cleanly into product experiences, marketing, and motion. • Make sure every engagement, ours or a client's, holds clarity, consistency, and purpose. Shape creative direction • Drive the creative process on major brand initiatives, setting the tone for identity systems, storytelling frameworks, and brand guidelines. • Work closely with product design leadership so brand and product feel like one coherent experience. • Lead cross-disciplinary critique, lifting the team's fluency in storytelling, systems thinking, and craft. • Push creative boundaries with motion, 3D, and interaction to create brand moments that feel alive. Champion collaboration and growth • Partner with design leadership and help win new work by pitching bold, brand-led approaches. • Keep Parallel's own brand at the highest bar of craft and cohesion across everything we put out. • Build a team culture rooted in openness, mentorship, and curiosity, where designers grow and thrive. • Connect brand, product, and marketing so the experience holds together end to end. What You Bring • Visionary brand leadership. You inspire creative excellence, communicate a clear and compelling brand vision, and earn client trust. You balance creative risk with strategic rigour, so every direction is both aspirational and grounded in business value. • Hands-on craft. You don't just direct great design, you do it. As one of the most senior makers in the room, you lead by example with exceptional craft and detail, and bring real design energy to pitches, reviews, and live work. • Brand systems expertise. You turn complex ideas into coherent, scalable systems across visual, verbal, and experiential, and you know how an identity holds up across environments, from a screen to motion to a physical moment. • Strategic storytelling. You see brand as narrative, where story, identity, and experience meet, and you guide teams and clients to articulate what makes their brand meaningful and distinct. • Cross-disciplinary collaboration. You move fluidly across product, strategy, and marketing, bringing a systems mindset that connects every touchpoint. • Mentorship and critique. You raise the people around you through coaching, high standards, and a culture of honest, constructive feedback. Requirements • 8+ years in brand design, creative direction, or design leadership, ideally in a digital-first environment. • Proven ability to lead multidisciplinary teams and large-scale brand engagements from strategy through execution. • A portfolio that shows mastery of visual identity, brand systems, and storytelling across digital touchpoints. • Experience presenting to executive stakeholders and turning creative thinking into strategic outcomes. • Fluency in modern d