Senior Director, Creative Design

Build the Future

At McGraw Hill, we are dedicated to delivering digital learning experiences that transform education for learners and educators. Our focus is on creating seamless, impactful products that truly benefit our users while supporting growth and collaboration across teams. We foster a culture that values innovation, teamwork, and a balance between career growth and personal well-being.

How can you make an impact?

McGraw Hill, the leading provider of digital and print educational solutions, is looking for a Senior Director, Creative Design within our K-12 division who will be responsible for shaping and guiding the overall creative vision, strategy, workflow, and team structure to build world-class educational products. The Senior Director will manage and inspire multiple teams of designers and is responsible for collaborating across product management, product marketing, academic design, user experience, and technology to develop and deliver effective and engaging teaching and learning experiences (both print and digital) in multiple content domains.

This position can work remotely within the continental United States.

What You'll do:

• Develop the Visual Strategy & Brand Identity: Define and maintain the visual identity for our portfolio programs that differentiate us in the market. Ensure consistent use of typography, color, illustration, and layout across textbooks, workbooks, and digital resources. Oversee the visual presentation of complex learning content (diagrams, infographics, tables, multimedia). Drive towards a cohesive experience across all touchpoints.
• Lead Creative Teams: Manage designers, media specialists, illustrators, animators, operations specialists, etc. to ensure work aligns with the vision and meets strategic goals. Provide feedback and mentorship to ensure high-quality, age-appropriate, and pedagogically sound designs.
• Champion User Empathy: Develop and foster an environment of design excellence that is rooted in user empathy. Balance process and productivity with craft and creative explorations; emphasis on early prototyping, iterative cycles, and learning directly from users. Your organization will produce designs that meet needs in surprisingly simple ways, ensuring that accessibility standards are always met.

The Senior Director will report to the Vice President of User Experience and will be a member of the leadership team who is accountable for defining holistic product experience and delivering industry leading programs to market. You will be part of driving design innovation, and you will proactively propose changes and improvements in process, people, and products to propel us forward. You will have direct management responsibility for approximately 100 individuals at varying levels within our creative and media design career pathways. You will operate in an environment that requires excellent problem-solving skills and exceptional team collaboration, facilitation, and communication skills while ensuring operational effectiveness of your teams, including delivery on time and budget. You must also be energized by collaboration with cross-functional teams, including content experts, project managers, business managers, UX strategists and designers, software engineers, and product marketing managers and strive to enable streamlined collaboration across teams at scale.

Key Duties:

• Define and execute comprehensive strategy for creative design, inclusive of print and digital, within McGraw Hill's preK-12 core, intervention, and supplemental programs.
• Lead creative design from conceptualization to implementation using an iterative approach including visual design, media production, and accessibility compliance.
• Lead design and media operations and systems, resulting in efficient and replicable processes, guidelines, and tools.
• Assess performance and establish design metrics related to design quality, efficiency, and impact.
• Participate in industry events, conferences, customer research and advisory boards.

What you will bring to the role:

• Creative Design Expertise: You know the importance of being able to quickly deliver a low fidelity concept, mockup, or prototype to facilitate discussion and get feedback. You also understand the tools and workflows needed to bring a creative design to life regardless of delivery medium, print or digital. You are a design thought leader within and outside the organization. You represent McGraw Hill to key groups within the industry and maintain a strong network within the design community.
• Design Strategy: You partner closely with Learning Architecture and Experience Strategy to define the holistic experience for our programs. You communicate a vision for visual and media design, including formulating and implementing design principles and values, for your teams and non-design stakeholders effectively impacting activities, behaviors, and mindsets. You define short- and long-term creative design strategies and roadmaps to implement them. Using a human-centered approach, you translate first-hand knowledge of customers into creative design goals, and direction.
• Leadership and Change Agency: You exhibit exceptional communication and leadership skills. You build broad support with peers and other cross-functional leaders, moving them to commitment and action. You have strong presence and work with your team to ensure effective collaboration with others and timely delivery of responsibilities. You develop and build a staff that embraces a continuous learning mindset, holds plans loosely and is open to iterative and incremental delivery, and celebrates failure because that means we've learned.
• Business and Financial Acumen: You understand how business value is created through creative design, and you help develop compelling business cases to fund new development. You also develop annual operating budgets in collaboration with leadership and monitor ongoing expenditures to ensure alignment. You know how to balance and support creative teams who strive for perfection when the business and our users might have different needs. You recognize that influence beats skills almost every time and refocus creative energy in that direction, when appropriate. You build industry best practices into the work to gain efficiency and productivity.

Requirements:

• Bachelor's Degree required, advanced degree (Masters or Doctorate) is preferred
• 10+ years of creative design experience
• 5+ years people leadership experience
• In-depth knowledge of human-centered design practices, research methodologies, design tools, and accessibility
• Experience managing vendors, independent contractors, and other third-party relationships
• Proven ability to build and lead strong teams; to inspire, influence, and negotiate at all levels of an organization
• Ed tech experience preferred

Why work for us?

The work you do at McGraw Hill will be work that matters. We are collectively designing content that will build the future of education. Play your part and experience a sense of fulfilment that will inspire you to even greater heights.

The pay range for this position is between $110,000-$160,000 annually, however, base pay offered may vary depending on job-related knowledge, skills, experience, and location. Click here to learn more about our benefit offerings.

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