Art Director (12-month contract) - Japan

Posted 5 Days Ago
Be an Early Applicant
Hiring Remotely in Tokyo, JPN
In-Office or Remote
Entry level
Digital Media • Information Technology • Software • Design
The Role
Creates Japan-focused digital and print designs, templates, illustrations, and creative concepts. Reviews Creator submissions, provides actionable design feedback, writes creative briefs, and uses AI tools to produce culturally relevant templates at scale. Partners with Design Leads to coordinate designers, ensuring work remains on-brief, high-quality, and delivered on schedule.
Summary Generated by Built In
Job Description

Join the team redefining how the world experiences design.

Hey, hello, hiya, g'day, 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 you're probably keen to find out what's on offer, so we'll 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 we’re focusing on Tokyo, Japan. So we can best support our teams and keep collaboration flowing.

What you’ll 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 we're 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

  • You've given design feedback before — and you know how to make it clear, kind and useful

  • You're 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

  • You've helped coordinate or guide a small group of designers before (or you're 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 what’s possible for a template - creating a new benchmark for fresh, high-quality design content within our collection. We're aiming to build the world’s 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

Canva's on a mission to democratise design, and localisation is a big part of that. It's 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, you'll oversee the end-to-end rollout of the Japan content library.

This role goes beyond designing templates yourself. You'll 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. You'll partner with the Design Lead to help manage our PPO designers, keeping work aligned, on-brief and on-time.

Skills Required

  • Experience as an Art Director, Graphic Designer, or Visual Designer across digital and print marketing
  • Genuine interest in design trends and styles specific to Japan
  • Portfolio demonstrating clean, elegant, high-quality design
  • Strong skills in hand illustration, typography, color, conceptual graphic design, and layout
  • Awareness of visual, cultural, and pop culture trends
  • Strong stylistic point of view grounded in design fundamentals
  • Ability to design for end users and deliver work on deadline and to brief
  • Experience providing clear, constructive, and useful design feedback
  • Comfort using AI tools in the design workflow
  • Ability to write concise creative briefs
  • Experience coordinating or guiding a small group of designers
  • Resume and portfolio link

Canva Compensation & Benefits Highlights

The following summarizes recurring compensation and benefits themes identified from responses generated by popular LLMs to common candidate questions about Canva and has not been reviewed or approved by Canva.

  • Parental & Family Support Permanent employees are eligible for 18 weeks of paid parental leave from day one, inclusive of all parents. Additional supports include flexibility in how leave is taken and resources around pregnancy loss and caregiving.
  • Leave & Time Off Breadth Extra paid time off categories expand beyond standard PTO. Examples include five Flex Leave days, three days of paid volunteering, and milestone Epic Experience time off at 5 and 10 years.
  • Equity Value & Accessibility Equity participation is a core element of total rewards. Company materials and industry reporting note periodic opportunities to realize value through secondary transactions, enhancing perceived upside.

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The Company
HQ: Sydney
5,500 Employees
Year Founded: 2013

What We Do

Canva is an online graphic design platform with a mission to empower everyone to design anything and publish anywhere, offering a free-to-use tool for creating social media posts, presentations, posters, videos, logos, and more.

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