Design Director, WSJ, Brand Marketing

Job Description:

Design Director, WSJ Brand Marketing
(Focus: Performance & Brand Design)

About the Role:

Dow Jones and The Wall Street Journal are seeking a talented, agile Design Director to join the Brand Marketing team. This role drives design direction for performance marketing and leads design execution across mid- and lower-funnel campaigns for WSJ, WSJ+, Barron’s, and MarketWatch, including paid platforms (Meta, Google360, Reddit, LinkedIn, etc.) and owned channels. You will also conceptualize, design, and build email campaigns that support acquisition, engagement, and retention goals.

In addition to performance marketing, this role contributes to broader brand design initiatives, including evolving visual identities and supporting the development of brand guidelines across Dow Jones brands. The Design Director directly supports the Lead Visual Designer and partners closely with performance marketing strategy, channel specialists, project management, and our creative production partner agency to produce impactful, brand-forward, design-driven campaigns that drive measurable results while ensuring adherence to brand standards.

The Design Director serves as a subject-matter expert for performance marketing design and an active contributor to brand identity evolution within Brand Marketing—central to fueling customer acquisition, informing optimization, and strengthening brand perception across touchpoints.

The ideal candidate is a strong visual designer—creative, strategic, systems-minded, detail-oriented, and energized by fast-paced, iterative work. You must be comfortable testing, learning, adapting, and scaling creative quickly based on real-time data and shifting priorities, while also contributing to longer-term brand design foundations.

Reports to: Lead Visual Designer

You Will:

Creative Strategy & Development for Performance Marketing

• Participate in ideation sessions, creative reviews, and feedback cycles to develop and refine campaign concepts.

• Translate strategic direction, campaign goals, and audience insights into effective design solutions within established and evolving brand systems.

• Set and evolve visual frameworks and creative standards for performance marketing that balance emerging visual identities with brand consistency.

• Define creative testing strategy in partnership with performance marketing leads to support experimentation and optimization.

• Design and produce high-quality creative across platforms, including static, animation, and lightweight video assets.

• Deliver a high volume of variations efficiently, in collaboration with the Brand team and creative production agency partner, while maintaining quality, brand alignment, and a test-and-learn mindset.

• Present work clearly with rationale and iterate quickly based on feedback, data, and performance insights.
   

Brand Consistency, Visual Identity & Guidelines

• Act as the primary brand guardian for performance marketing creative, ensuring all outputs meet brand standards and quality thresholds.

• Contribute to the evolution of visual identities across WSJ, WSJ+, and Dow Jones brands, including exploratory design, refinement, and implementation across touchpoints.

• Support the creation and evolution of brand guidelines, partnering with Brand Design leadership to document visual standards, usage rules, and best practices.

• Maintain deep understanding of brand guidelines and visual identity systems to ensure consistency and design excellence across all assets and channels.

• Drive cross-channel creative cohesion across performance marketing touchpoints to reinforce brand clarity and recognition.

Design Execution & Optimization

• Execute designs that align with briefs, business objectives, and brand standards while supporting performance and scalability.

• Retouch images, edit video, and perform visual enhancements to ensure polished, high-quality output.

• Lead creative optimization strategy across platforms and channels using performance data, audience behavior, and platform insights.

• Apply accessibility standards and platform best practices across all creative outputs.

Collaboration, Guidance & Influence

• Partner closely with the Brand team, project managers, and creative production agency partner to understand objectives, plan workload, meet timelines, and deliver cohesive creative.

• Provide directional feedback and creative guidance to agency partners and internal designers, grounded in brand standards, systems, and campaign objectives.

• Serve as a subject-matter expert and internal advisor for performance marketing design within Brand Marketing.

• Support and mentor other designers on the team through informal guidance, feedback, and shared best practices (without direct people management).

• Ensure design solutions support marketing and revenue objectives while reinforcing brand standards.

Best Practices, Trend Awareness & Craft Leadership

• Stay current on industry best practices, platform updates, competitor creative and campaigns, and emerging approaches in performance marketing and brand design.

• Track social media, lifestyle, cultural, and platform-native trends to create relevant, engaging creative.

• Be a continuous learner, applying insights from design, creative, and category-adjacent trends to inspire new approaches.

• Champion high craft standards and a design-forward culture within Brand Marketing.

What You’ll Do

• Own the creative direction for performance marketing design across paid and owned channels.

• Concept, design, and deliver performance-driven creative across platforms.

• Contribute to visual identity evolution and brand guideline development across Dow Jones brands.

• Build email layouts and enhance visual systems for customer engagement and acquisition flows.

• Translate strategy, insights, and data into audience-first creative solutions.

• Design, test, and iterate a high volume of campaign assets efficiently.

• Present ideas and concepts clearly and effectively to colleagues and stakeholders.

• Ensure every asset is on-brand, high-quality, and aligned with broader business and marketing priorities.

• Apply platform best practices and trend awareness to continuously evolve the creative approach.

• Incorporate performance learnings and customer insights to refine creative output.

• Contribute to a culture of experimentation, agility, and creative innovation within marketing.

• Execute work using Figma, Knak, and Adobe Creative Cloud with consistency and quality.

You Have:

• 7+ years of experience in visual design, marketing design, or performance creative.

• Strong portfolio demonstrating visual design excellence and experience building or evolving digital brand identities.

• Expertise in Figma and Adobe Creative Suite (AfterEffects, Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign).

• Experience producing both static and animation/video creative for performance platforms.

• Strong understanding of brand identity, layout, typography, and visual systems.

• Ability to balance brand integrity with performance-driven experimentation.

• Thrives in fast-paced, high-output environments with shifting priorities.

• Excellent communication skills and ability to present and explain design decisions clearly.

• Familiarity with accessibility standards and best practices.

• BA/BFA in Graphic Design, Visual Design, Visual

Our Benefits

• Comprehensive Healthcare Plans

• Paid Time Off

• Retirement Plans

• Comprehensive Insurance Plans

• Lifestyle programs & Wellness Resources

• Education Benefits

• Family Care Benefits & Caregiving Support

• Commuter Transit Program

• Subscription Discounts

• Employee Referral Program

Learn more about all our US benefits

All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, protected veteran status, or disability status. EEO/AA/M/F/Disabled/Vets .

Dow Jones is committed to providing reasonable accommodation for qualified individuals with disabilities, in our job application and/or interview process. If you need assistance or accommodation in completing your application, due to a disability, please reach out to us at TalentResourceTeam@dowjones.com. Please put "Reasonable Accommodation" in the subject line. This inbox will not be monitored for application status updates.

Reasonable accommodation: Dow Jones, Making Careers Newsworthy - We are an equal opportunity employer and all qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, pregnancy, age, national origin, disability status, genetic information, protected veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by law. EEO/Disabled/Vets. Dow Jones is committed to providing reasonable accommodation for qualified individuals with disabilities, in our job application and/or interview process. If you need assistance or accommodation in completing your application, due to a disability, email us at talentresourceteam@dowjones.com. Please put "Reasonable Accommodation" in the subject line and provide a brief description of the type of assistance you need. This inbox will not be monitored for application status updates.

Business Area:

Dow Jones - Marketing

Job Category:

Creative & Design

Union Status:

Non-Union role

Pay Range: 105,000.00 - 130,000.00

We recognize that attracting the best talent is key to our strategy and success as a company. As a result, we aim for flexibility in structuring competitive compensation offers to ensure we are able to attract the best candidates. The quoted salary range represents our good faith estimate as to what our ideal candidates are likely to expect, and we tailor our offers within the range based on the selected candidate's experience, industry knowledge, location, technical and communication skills, and other factors that may prove relevant during the interview process.

Pay-for-performance is a key element in our strategy to attract, engage, and motivate talented people to do their best work. Similarly to salary, for bonus eligible roles, targets are set based on a variety of factors including competitive market practice.

For benefits eligible roles, in addition to cash compensation, the company provides a comprehensive and highly competitive benefits package, with a variety of physical health, retirement and savings, caregiving, emotional wellbeing, transportation, and other benefits, including "elective" benefits employees may select to best fit the needs and personal situations of our diverse workforce..