Creative Lead

Come and co-pilot our creative department ⚡️

About the opportunity

We’re looking for a kind, inspiring, ambitious, collaborative leader to come and help steer the creative department at Lovers, guiding our teams and clients to creative success across a varied range of brand communication projects. Passionate about helping brands communicate in amazing ways, you’ll shape Lovers’ creative responses to briefs across our three core offers: branding, campaigns and key comms. We’ll support you to develop as the creative leader you want to become, building head-turning, smile-raising outcomes across with clients as varied as Greenpeace, Nike and the Museum of Sex. You’ll work on identities, advertising campaigns, social media projects, films, billboards, books and other media.

Lovers is a very special and relatively young creative business driven by collective creative power. Entrepreneurial and collaborative, this role is about mastering the art of tactfully enlisting our collective of designers, copywriters, strategists, researchers, photographers, illustrators, filmmakers, animators and others, to help brands communicate distinctively. Handpicking and guiding passionate project-specific teams, your job is to instruct and steward their talents in tune with project vision to create ambitious, useful, emotive and memorable creative work everyone’s excited to be a part of.

This is a truly rare invitation for a visionary ‘people person’ who wants to grow their collaborative powers, connections and creative leadership skills far beyond past experience. You’ll be given a clear leadership position within our full time team, reporting creatively to our founder / creative director, as well as our production director, enlisting support from, and helping to develop, our creative strategist also. We’ll show you the inner workings and methodology of our model and business, invited to help propel Lovers bravely forwards. You’ll become a key Lovers representative and creative role model amongst peers, inspiring seasoned collaborators and up-and-coming talent alike.

Between creative projects for clients, you’ll also help curate extracurricular initiatives, including our play space, Pillow Talk and Lovers get-togethers. You’ll actively recruit new members into the group as well. Above all, you’ll learn how to collaborate fairly and effectively at Lovers, something remarkably few creative companies are focused on properly teaching.

The role in detail

You’ll join our small, passionate central team, sharing responsibility for leading and orchestrating the wider Lovers collective and our projects. As creative lead it’s your job to figure out what creative solutions we should develop for our projects, working collaboratively to develop and realise them, supported by your fellow leaders in the Lovers studio.

Our varied projects will immerse you in diverse and fascinating subjects. So far we’ve delved into theatre, art, dance, dating, death, sex, film, food, geology, shoes, education, music, child protection and environmental justice. This is always changing and growing, and you’ll actively help win our next round of projects too. Our work is multidisciplinary, so you may find yourself co-creating brand identity systems, tone of voice, campaigns, adverts, printed books, digital tools, spacial elements like signage and way finding, and more.

Many ideas will start with you, but you’ll constantly be dreaming about which comrades you want to enlist to help develop and execute projects with you. You’ll have the support of our experienced creative director, production director, creative producer and creative strategist — bright, friendly people who want you to succeed. You’ll have direct contact with clients and responsibility for helping them feel confident in you, Lovers, and the work we’re delivering.

Here’s a list of specific things you’ll need to perform well in this role:

• Positive, Idealistic outlook. We use this every single day.
• Determination. We work hard, then go home usually on time.
• Perceptiveness. Noticing things, more keenly than most.
• Foresight. Thinking ahead to help projects run smoothly.
• Interrogating briefs. Digesting and unpacking challenges.
• Scoping projects. Forming ideas about how you want projects to run.
• Imaginative thinking. Having ideas that are relevant and exciting.
• Identifying collaborators. Figuring out who to bring on board.
• Brilliant briefing. Instructing your colleagues clearly and fairly.
• Bringing the best out of people. That’s key to creative leadership.
• Building proposals. Designing and writing killer presentations.
• Making friends. Constantly, with clients, with collaborators.
• Communicating. Speaking and writing warmly and clearly.
• Professionalism. Being on point, on time, on budget.
• Pro-active Instinct. We’re often inventing and improvising.
• Cultural awareness. We’re sensitive to the world around us.
• Design & Art Direction fluency. Your native tongue, including Adobe.
• Strategic interest. Strategy is something that interests you.
• Presenting skills. Responsibly presenting and explaining work.
• Management skills. You’ll manage collaborators, and our studio team creative strategist.

Here are some strands of experience you’ll need to draw and build upon:

• Developing compelling brand identities, campaigns and key comms. Essential experience.
• Briefing collaborators. You’ve instructed and involved people in your work before.
• Thinking for yourself. You’re got some confidence as a self-starter.
• Guiding work to greatness. You can usually spot what a piece of work needs next.
• Multidisciplinary working. You’ve at least dipped your toe beyond a single discipline.
• Developing concepts. You know how to shape an idea, from hazy to clear.
• Pitching ideas. You know how to present ideas in a clear, compelling way.
• Navigating feedback. You can listen carefully, negotiating the best path forwards.
• Commissioning assets. For example; photography, illustrations, sound, film.
• Running personal projects. You make time to follow persona creative passions.

About you

We’ve deliberately written this job description to make sure it’s not asking you to ‘be’ any particular type of person, so if you feel you could do the job (or learn to do it) then please consider applying, whoever you are. Lovers is a place for all talented creative people, regardless of background. Here are some traits you might recognise in yourself:

What really gets you out of bed in the morning is a natural excitement to get on with the creative project(s) you’re working on, so you can progress them to specialness. Mixing playful, lateral thinking with high visual and executional standards, you care deeply about design, typography, how things look, sound, feel. You care about ideas, words, colours, images. You’re a sensitive noticer of all kinds of details, and how things come across. You want to make really original creative work that helps communicate things worth communicating.

Rather than try to do everything yourself, you’re excited to involve others in your projects and you like making new friends. You’re a thoughtful person that puts effort into collaborating fairly and intelligently with those around you, something you want to get better and better at. People like working with you. You love to learn and grow. You enjoy trying to achieve new things, breaking new ground.

With a background in creative communication for brands (perhaps from branding, design or advertising), you’re ready to open up your working approach to become increasingly multidisciplinary, realising ideas with other great people. You want to be somewhere you can be supported to achieve amazing results for amazing clients. You’d also love to help a great company grow, learning how to help a creative business blossom. You’re ready to be challenged, and grow into a true creative leader.

About Lovers

We’re a rising generation of designers and creatives who want to work on projects that feel good, for organisations we respect. We want our industry to do less harm to the people in it and to the world around it, so we’re on a mission to build a new and different creative supergroup model and methodology geared towards making thoughtful, effortful creative work that feels great. This model combines a small central team with a diverse and inspiring collective of individuals with an array of talents, interests and personalities.

So far we’ve rebranded Alexandra Palace, the Royal Court theatre, Green Man Festival and other culture shapers. We’ve made award-winning animations for the NSPCC and video art for the V&A and Google. We’ve designed international Greenpeace campaigns, social media campaigns for Nike, a brand film for Warner Recorded Music, TV commercials for dating app Badoo and My/Mochi Ice Cream in the US. We’ve grown our collective from a handful to a few dozen brilliant people spread across London and around the world. We only help organisations we want to see thrive, doing positive, interesting things in business and society.

Our work is what happens when super-talented, motivated people work together on projects they care about. There’s not really an aesthetic style at Lovers, but there is a consistent ‘energy’ to the work. It’s hard to define but we think it’s something to do with ingredients like playful creative thinking, deep belief in creative processes, a refusal to make dull, expected brand communications, an appetite to engage people’s emotions and use words in interesting ways, and a loving care and attention towards craft details, with the occasional theatrical touch. We want you to add to this Lovers ‘way’, evolving and defining it with us.

Company Benefits

• Yearly Learning & Development budget
• Accessible, comfortable studio based in London Fields
• Hybrid working set-up (we’re currently working from our studio two days a week)
• Flexible working hours
• Carbon offsetting scheme
• Paid' good time' in line with Lovers’ social and environmental goals
• Cycle-to-work scheme
• Christmas studio closure