Associate Director, Product Design (contract)

Company Description

Digitas is the Networked Experience Agency, built on the vision that we create magnetic experiences that earn the right for brands to exist in human networks. Today, and tomorrow. We deliver Networked Experiences by leveraging comprehensive data, technology, creative, media and strategy capabilities. Digitas delivers ambitious outcomes via unique solutions that include Creative Experiences, Integrated Media, Addressable Relationships, Social Marketing and Total Commerce. Celebrated by AdAge as Data and Insights Agency of the Year, U.S Campaign’s Brand Experience Agency of the Year, Media Network of the Year and celebrated by Forrester and Gartner, Digitas serves the world’s leading brands through a global network comprised of more than 5,500 employees across over 65 offices in 43 countries.

The Digitas culture is made up of fearless, inventive and generous Unicorns of all kinds.

Overview

Digitas is looking for a contract Associate Director, Product Design to support a pair of high-profile client accounts!

At Digitas, our Senior Product Designers build digital experiences people love to use. They sit squarely at the intersection of experience design, visual design, and systems thinking with an emphasis on precision, consistency, and craft. They are collaborators and innovators who thrive in multidisciplinary teams, can start from a blank page and help realize the vision for a great experience, and aren’t afraid to get their hands dirty making that vision a reality.

Our experience runs the gamut from site to mobile, eCom to campaign to B2B, marketing to editorial to product, with one foot in beautiful visual expressions and the other in rock-solid user experience. At heart, we are designers who love creating new, meaningful experiences and are well-versed in the practice of modern digital experience creation.

In this role, you will serve as the executional design lead for the creation of digital experiences. In partnership with client teams as well as Digitas UX, Development, and Content teams, you will translate client business goals and brand strategy into beautiful, polished, scalable web and product experiences that are effective, innovative, and on-brand while also working within (and continuing to evolve) previously-established design systems.

This is a blended role that offers the opportunity for strategic direction, hands-on design, and client engagement as well as meaningful product ownership across both visual and architectural UX.

Who you are:

• You re a leader who will help set the vision for your teams and their projects. You know how to get briefed on a new project, collaborate with a team to tackle the challenge, and manage, organize and defend the work of your team members, while also contributing to the day to day outputs. You re as comfortable sweating the details of a design interaction as you are presenting your teams’ work. You are passionate about creating beautiful visual design assets and also love creating the information architecture for an experience. You re a strong advocate for the customer. You re formally trained in design and passionate about customer-centric innovation. You take pride in your work. You obsess over details and insist on iterating until you ve gotten it right. You see feedback as a good thing. You re a storyteller who is at ease presenting and discussing your work with clients and stakeholders. You challenge old ways of thinking and put the customer at the center of everything you do. User-Centered Design methodologies are second nature to you. You are never content with good enough and are always looking for ways to innovate and drive designs, experiences, and client relationships to the next level.

What you do:

• You take ownership of UI and visual design assets for projects and work closely with other team members as well as other disciplines to create extraordinary digital experiences. You serve as a design thinking resource across products/platforms and content/campaigns. You collaborate with all other disciplines and understand the dependencies that impact design and development throughout the project life cycle. You are skilled in all aspects of UI/interaction design and have a deep understanding of UX architecture, design, and content strategy.

 PLEASE NOTE:

• This is a 40hr/week freelance role expected to start in mid-March/early-April and run for a period of 3-6 months. Extension beyond that window or conversion into a full-time role following the completion of the freelance period is possible but not anticipated.
• This is a hybrid role based out of our Chicago office and will require occasional onsite engagement of about 3 days/week. Candidates who are local to the Chicago area and willing to commit to a hybrid schedule will be prioritized but highly qualified candidates in other markets who are willing to work Central Time hours may also be considered.
• We are not able to support any form of current or future visa sponsorship needs for this role. No 3rd party-staffing agencies, please.

Job Responsibilities

• Partner with clients and Digitas Experience Design leaders to define project expectations, present and defend work, and own project delivery workstreams and design execution from concept through delivery, ensuring accuracy, clarity, and polish at every step.
• Design and build low- and high-fidelity UX, UI, and visual deliverables for web-based product and marketing pages, dashboards, and other digital channels across responsive breakpoints.
• Apply and evolve existing design systems, component libraries, and style guides with consistency and care.
• Create production-ready design artifacts including page layouts, component specs, interaction states, and documentation.
• Partner with cross-functional teams including UX, copy, engineering, and client stakeholders to bring designs to life.
• Maintain rigorous attention to detail, QA-ing designs for visual accuracy, accessibility, and system alignment.
• Contribute to style guide creation, system documentation, and best-practice guidelines.
• Present work clearly and confidently, articulating design rationale and tradeoffs.
• Support multiple workstreams while managing priorities, timelines, and feedback efficiently.

Qualifications

• 7+ years of progressively-responsible experience in experience design, product design, digital design, or UI design within an advertising agency, media organization, in-house agency, consultancy, or product-driven environment.
• Bachelor s degree in UX design, interaction design, human-computer interaction, industrial design, or a similar field preferred; experience may be substituted.
• Prior experience partnering directly with clients to confidently present work, articulate rationale for approach in the context of both business and user needs, and workshop and brainstorm iterative changes to ongoing projects.
• Prior experience leading project teams of designers and content strategists to produce on-time and quality deliverables.
• Deep understanding of the full experience design process from research to architecture to visual design.
• Experience building a variety UX deliverables including user flows, site and journey maps, personas, mockups, prototypes, and wireframes and enough research experience to be dangerous.
• A strong visual design foundation with proven experience designing polished, system-driven UI and an eye for the fundamentals of visual design including color, typography, illustration, motion, etc.
• Advanced proficiency in Figma (including components, variants, libraries, and documentation workflows) as well as other specialized tools including Adobe Creative Cloud, Sketch, InVision, and Keynote.
• Experience working within large-scale design systems and contributing to their evolution, modernization, and enhancement.
• Experience collaborating closely with engineers, UX, content, and product partners including handoff workflows and design specs
• Familiarity with prompt-based interaction and commonly used generative AI tools (e.g., ChatGPT, Google Gemini, DALL·E, Midjourney) is a plus, especially for tasks like ideation, research, or content generation. 
• Strong understanding of responsive web design, accessibility standards, and UX/UI best practices.
• Ability to think holistically through user flows and other experience models.
• Experience partnering with other capabilities to strategize, design and build the work, including annotating complex interactions
• Curiosity for (or a deep immersion in) the technology of modern experiences.
• Experience working within an agile design process.
• Demonstrated ability to think holistically about an experience to ensure user and business needs are met.
• Comfort operating with a high level of ownership, autonomy, and accountability.
• Basic understanding of front-end development technologies.
• Ability to accept and synthesize feedback quickly while maintaining design integrity.
• Experience working within a cross-functional, multi-disciplinary team on customer-focused products and services.
• A natural sense of urgency and an ability to work quickly, efficiently, and accurately within tight deadlines and constantly-evolving project parameters, scope, and goals.
• Flexible and adaptable with an ability to manage and prioritize multiple concurrent projects with constantly shifting parameters and targets.
• Highly collaborative but independently capable.
• Assertive, confident communication skills and a willingness to ask questions and take initiative.
• Scrappy and entrepreneurial with a drive to evolve and innovate.
• Prior experience mentoring and leading teams of designers.
• A portfolio showcasing innovative, impactful, high-quality UX/UI, product, and marketing-driven digital experiences is REQUIRED and should be submitted at the time of application.

Additional Information