Associate Creative Director — UX/UI

Photon is seeking an Associate Creative Director to lead the creative engagement for our Société Générale account. Working alongside a Creative Lead, you will combine creative direction, client leadership, and hands‑on design expertise with responsibility for the planning and coordination that keep an engagement moving.

You will lead a focused, two‑person design team, guiding work from discovery through implementation. This role requires strong proficiency in both UX and UI, sound creative judgment, and the willingness to contribute directly to design when needed.

Your responsibilities

Creative direction and design quality

• Establish the creative direction, translating business objectives, user needs, and research findings into compelling digital experiences.
• Guide concept development, challenge assumptions, and provide clear, actionable feedback that strengthens both usability and visual craft.
• Lead creative decision-making in partnership with the client, building alignment around a clear design rationale.
• Review and approve wireframes, visual designs, prototypes, and supporting deliverables before client presentation or development handoff.
• Contribute hands‑on design work when needed to explore concepts, resolve complex problems, or support delivery.

Client and account leadership

• Act as the primary creative contact for the account, building trusted relationships and managing expectations throughout the engagement.
• Own day‑to‑day creative account coordination, including scheduling meetings, preparing agendas and presentations, coordinating participants, and following up on decisions.
• Develop and maintain project plans, review schedules, and meeting cadences; coordinate dependencies with client stakeholders, business analysts, and engineering teams.
• Maintain clear records of feedback, actions, approvals, and delivery status.
• Identify risks, scope changes, and resource constraints early, escalating them with practical recommendations.

Discovery, research, and delivery

• Plan and facilitate Creative Discovery workshops to align business priorities, user needs, success indicators, and product direction.
• Plan and conduct stakeholder and user interviews, lead research synthesis, and develop user journey maps with support from the Creative Lead.
• Collaborate with the Creative Lead on information architecture, interaction design, and usability testing.
• Guide work through iterative design and delivery cycles, securing timely feedback and signoff.
• Partner with engineering to communicate design intent, resolve implementation questions, and review the quality of the resulting experience.

Team leadership

• Provide clear priorities, constructive critique, coaching, and development support to the Creative Lead.
• Balance delivery commitments with realistic workloads and team wellbeing.
• Uphold Photon’s creative processes, documentation standards, and quality expectations.

What you bring

• Deep expertise across both UX and UI, supported by a portfolio demonstrating strong problem‑solving, original creative direction, and polished digital product design.
• Advanced Figma proficiency, including Auto Layout, components, variants, variables, and design tokens.
• Strong capability in responsive design, interactive prototyping, accessible design, and creating or extending design systems.
• Experience leading research, facilitating workshops, presenting to clients, and guiding design through implementation.
• Strong planning and organizational skills, with the ability to manage the administrative detail required to deliver an engagement successfully.
• Fluent French, with the ability to facilitate workshops, present design recommendations, and manage client conversations confidently.

Preferred experience

• Approximately 15 or more years of overall design experience.
• More than five years in a formal team leadership role.
• Experience using AI-assisted design tools to support exploration, synthesis, prototyping, or production, with appropriate human review.

Your portfolio should show both the quality of your own design work and your impact as a creative leader. Be prepared to explain your contribution, the rationale behind key decisions, how you directed others, and how the work progressed from initial understanding to delivery. Your folio should show full process and not just completed work.