Senior Designer, Illustration + AI Focus [AQ-18376]

About the role

Aquent is partnering with a large, dynamic e-commerce retailer known for delighting customers with unique and engaging experiences. This company is on a mission to bring joy and personality to every customer interaction, from their digital platforms to the physical products they send out. If you’re an illustrator ready to infuse warmth, humor, and character into high-impact customer touchpoints, this is your chance to see your creative vision come to life and make a tangible difference in how customers connect with a beloved brand. We are seeking a highly skilled and imaginative illustrator to join a vibrant creative team. This is an incredible opportunity to shape the visual identity of customer-facing content, bringing a distinctive, playful, and a little silly brand voice to life through your art. You’ll be at the forefront of creating memorable moments that make customers smile, contributing directly to the brand’s unique connection with its audience. Your work will be central to how this retailer communicates, entertains, and informs, ensuring that every interaction is infused with personality and charm.

Responsibilities

• Designing engaging greeting cards and stickers that reach real customers, adding a personal touch to their experience.
• Crafting illustrated social content and editorial art for the brand’s blog, enhancing storytelling and engagement.
• Developing infographics that transform complex information into friendly, accessible, and visually appealing content.
• Creating a wide range of illustration-forward customer moments across various formats, ensuring a consistent and delightful brand experience.
• Delivering high-volume creative work that ships quickly, seeing your illustrations deployed and making an impact in the real world.

Requirements

• A portfolio showcasing strong illustration skills, including character work, spot illustration, lettering, iconography, and editorial art, demonstrating both your artistic ability and your thought process.
• A genuine enthusiasm for infusing personality, warmth, and humor into your work, aligning with the brand’s distinctive voice.
• The proven ability to adapt and work within an established illustration system, matching, extending, and enhancing it without overwriting its core identity.
• Exceptional craft and finish, producing clean, intentional, and production-ready files for both print and digital applications.
• The capacity to maintain speed and efficiency without sacrificing quality, thriving in a fast-paced environment with two-week sprints and multiple concurrent projects.
• Solid understanding of design fundamentals, including composition, typography, color, hierarchy, and experience working within templates and design systems.
• Strong self-direction, making smart decisions, asking insightful questions, and keeping projects moving forward even with incomplete briefs.
• Experience illustrating for consumer products such as greeting cards, stationery, stickers, apparel graphics, packaging, merchandise, or toys.
• Background in retail, e-commerce, pet, kids, or lifestyle brand environments.
• Experience working within Agile or sprint-based creative team structures.
• Familiarity with AI-assisted illustration tools, and an openness to using them to accelerate early development, while maintaining ownership of the drawing, taste, and finishing.
• Secondary skills in motion, animation, or hand lettering.
• Adobe Creative Suite (Illustrator, Photoshop, InDesign), Figma, Procreate or equivalent.

Benefits

• Subsidized health, vision, and dental plans
• Paid sick leave
• Retirement plans with a match
• Free online training through Aquent Gymnasium