Creative Director

Who We Are

TOPOSOPHY is a place strategy and experience consultancy. We help cities, regions, national bodies and brands understand how places are experienced and made to work - for the people who live in them as much as the people who visit.

For fifteen years we have delivered projects in over twenty countries across four continents. We are twenty people across Athens, Dublin and London.

We have worked with European Travel Commission, UN Tourism, UNDP, EBRD, Amsterdam & Partners, Glasgow Life, Historic Environment Scotland, Visit Belfast, Mastercard, Alpha Bank, Coca-Cola, Aegean, and the Greek National Tourism Organisation.

We also create and run signature/licensed events and branded assets - Dine Athens, Stay in Athens, Taste of Athens, Around the Table among others.

About the Role

We are looking for a Creative Director to lead the creative direction of our experience platforms and of the TOPOSOPHY brand.

This is a role about building identity systems, not just campaigns. Our creative platforms and branded assets run year after year and across different partners and cities, so the creative work has to hold up when it is applied by other people, without us in the room.

You will report to the CEO, set the creative standard for the firm, and have real authority over the decisions in your area.

Requirements

Key Responsibilities

Event Identity & Design

• Develop and evolve the visual and verbal identities of our event platforms
• Build the guidelines, systems and toolkits that keep them consistent wherever they run
• Define what remains fixed and what can adapt across partners, audiences and cities
• Translate identities into real-world applications across digital, print, signage, environments and event experiences

The TOPOSOPHY Brand

• Own and evolve the TOPOSOPHY visual identity
• Lead the creative direction of our website, presentations, pitches and proposals
• Build systems and templates that raise the quality and consistency of creative work across the firm

Creative Leadership

• Set and hold the creative standard across the business
• Lead a Brand Designer and direct external creative partners across photography, film, illustration and motion
• Review work, give clear direction and make creative decisions when there are competing views
• Bring new ideas, references, collaborators and creative networks into the firm
• Build effective AI-assisted creative workflows that improve the quality and speed of the team's work

Skills & Profile

Background

• Substantial experience in brand and identity design at senior, lead or Creative Director level
• A strong portfolio of brand and identity work showing systems rather than one-off executions
• A track record of creating identities that other people have had to apply - through guidelines, toolkits, multi-market or multi-partner rollouts
• Experience with a city, cultural institution, festival, museum, hospitality brand or place brand - or a convincing case for why your experience transfers
• Experience leading designers and directing external creative suppliers
• Studio, in-house brand or consultancy backgrounds are all relevant. Agency campaign backgrounds are welcome where the systems work is there
• Fluent English; Greek is a strong advantage
• Based in or willing to relocate to Athens, with some travel to UK/Ireland and our other markets when required.

Technical

• Expert in Adobe Creative Suite - particularly Illustrator, InDesign and Photoshop - and Figma
• Typography at a high level: type selection, pairing, licensing, and commissioning or adapting typefaces where a project calls for it
• Strong understanding of colour systems, accessibility and contrast standards, and how identities behave across print, screen, environmental and large-format applications
• Brand guideline authoring - able to turn creative decisions into clear rules that other people can understand and apply
• Design systems, component libraries and file architecture that allow teams to work consistently and efficiently
• Art direction of photography, film, illustration and motion, including briefing, commissioning and sourcing
• Comfortable specifying for print production and fabrication, including stock, finishes, signage, wayfinding and event environments
• Presentation and pitch design - Keynote, PowerPoint and Figma - to a standard that stands up in front of a client board
• Working knowledge of web design and front-end constraints, sufficient to brief developers and review implementation
• Fluent with current AI creative tools and able to use them at a professional standard, including:
• Image generation and editing for concepting, visual exploration, mood and art-direction references
• Generative editing in Photoshop and Illustrator, including fill, expand, retouching, upscaling and object or background work
• Video and motion generation for animatics, pitch material, prototypes and social assets
• Prompting as a creative skill: able to art-direct models towards a specific result rather than simply generate options
• Good judgment about when AI is useful - and when the right answer is to commission, photograph, film, illustrate or design properly
• Strong awareness of rights, provenance, brand risk and client sensitivity, particularly when working with public-sector and institutional clients

How You Work

• Decisive. You form a view, argue it clearly and commit. You are comfortable being the person who makes the creative call.
• Systems-minded. You think in rules, relationships and applications, not just individual artefacts.
• Commercially literate. You understand that budget, margin, production realities.
• Self-starting. You do not wait for a perfectly formed brief. You bring ideas, references and provocations of your own.
• Steady under pressure. Events have fixed dates. You can protect quality when the deadline does not move.
• Direct and collaborative. You give and take critique without ceremony and work well with strategists, researchers, marketers and event teams who are not designers.
• Curious about place. You are genuinely interested in cities, food, culture, hospitality and how people experience and use places and spaces.

Benefits

• Competitive salary
• Private health insurance coverage
• Hybrid work model - a mix of in-office and remote working
• Equipment & professional development allowance
• Real creative authority and a direct line to the CEO
• Budget for external creative suppliers
• Work that becomes public and lives in real places - across events, brands and experiences used by thousands of people