Art Director (12-month contract) Japan

Join the team redefining how the world experiences design.

Hey hello hiya gday mabuhay kia ora 你好 hallo vítejte こんにちは!

Thanks for stopping by. We know job hunting can be a little time consuming and youre probably keen to find out whats on offer so well get straight to the point.

Where and how you can work

Our headquarters is in sunny Sydney Australia but our team spans the globe. While we support flexible remote-friendly ways of working for this role were focusing on Tokyo Japan. So we can best support our teams and keep collaboration flowing.

What youll do (responsibilities)

• Create a range of fresh varied and beautiful designs for our Japan community

• Develop unique concepts for templates across themes and topics that resonate in Japan

• Design supporting assets illustrations and design elements that make templates shine

• Suggest new design styles and creative directions that fit what local users want

• Review Creator template submissions and give clear actionable feedback that lifts quality and keeps everything on-brand

• Use AI tools to create templates at scale for the Japan market without compromising craft or cultural relevance

• Write Creator briefs that give clear direction context and inspiration so Creators can do their best work

• Partner with the Design Lead to manage PPO designers keeping work on track on-brief and shipping on deadline

Qualifications :

What were looking for

• Experience as an Art Director a Graphic Designer or a Visual Designer across digital and print marketing

• A genuine love for design trends and styles specific to Japan

• A portfolio that shows your passion for clean elegant beautiful design

• Strong craft in hand illustration typography colour conceptual graphic design and layout

• A sharp eye for visual cultural and pop culture trends

• A strong stylistic point of view grounded in design fundamentals

• You design with the end user in mind and deliver great work on deadline and to brief

• Youve given design feedback before and you know how to make it clear kind and useful

• Youre comfortable using AI tools in your design workflow and curious about pushing them further

• You can write a tight creative brief that sets other designers up for success

• Youve helped coordinate or guide a small group of designers before (or youre excited to step into that)

When applying to this role please provide the following:

• Your resume

• A link to your portfolio 

Additional Information :

About the Group/Team

Our marketplace of templates provides the perfect place for our users to begin their design journey. The Canva team wants to work with talented designers from across the world to redefine whats possible for a template - creating a new benchmark for fresh high-quality design content within our collection. Were aiming to build the worlds best design marketplace with a library of designs that offer our users a wide variety of usable and dynamic content - and to do that we need the help of talented designers that can create amazing content.

About the Role/Specialty

Canvas on a mission to democratise design and localisation is a big part of that. Its not enough to translate content from English we want every market to have templates that reflect their own design aesthetics and trends. Working closely with copywriters illustrators market growth and localisation specialists youll oversee the end-to-end rollout of the Japan content library.

This role goes beyond designing templates yourself. Youll also shape what our external Creators make writing clear Creator briefs reviewing their template submissions and using AI to create templates at scale for the Japan market. Youll partner with the Design Lead to help manage our PPO designers keeping work aligned on-brief and on-time.

Remote Work :

Yes

Employment Type :

Contract