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 optimizat