Design Director or Creative Director: What’s the difference?
A a designer working in the field for a long time, I have to apologize about job titles. As a young discipline, we haven’t had time to standardize them. This problem is compounded by the fact that many who create design roles aren’t from the field.
Involving a design manager as you build your team ensures that the leveling and titles work for both your organization and incoming hires. Some top talent won’t take a role if the title doesn’t align with the responsibilities. I know we’re not supposed to be obsessed with job titles, but they exist and they live right next our names. They determine our pay and our lines of reporting. They matter.
But back to the issue at hand — aren’t a Design Director and Creative Director just different names for the same thing? No. They’re similar names for very different things. First, let’s define design.
At the contributor level, design is a proven process for changing people’s behavior through five main steps:
Discovery: Organizational goal research, user research and testing, competitive analysis.
Definition: Combining organizational and user goals into a defined scope of work including desired outcomes.
Exploration: Generate the widest and most diverse possible number of solutions.
Testing: Internal and user testing to learn which solutions best address the project’s goals.
Production: Creating workflows and tangible deliverables.
Both a Design Director and Creative Director will leverage this process, but the latter tends to do so as a means to focus their own artistic vision.
Creative Direction is the purview of marketing campaigns and branding. The output is less expected, more edgy. The goal is to get someone to feel something, a feeling that motivates action.
A Director of Design is more of a manager. They may set creative vision, but their purview is more about creating the conditions for a team to produce effective materials and software. Is less a singular vision, and more a shared iterative process.
For example, in my role as Design Manager at Assessment ment for Good, I worked closely with our Director of Strategy to source an outside creative agency to reimagine the world in which our games take place. My day to day work is creating games that get our team the data we need to refine our systems of social and emotional learning (SEL) measurement, but the agency, The Little Labs, took a step back and looked at the suite of games as a whole. They created a story and illustrations that sort the suite, and get it kids to feel like the games are interesting and exciting enough to be worth their time.
Internally, I led the pitches of breaking this work into shippable pieces and modifying our existing user interfaces to support this story.
As you hire, remember that a Creative Director leads mainly aesthetic exploration and experimentation. A Design Director coordinates all design activity (including creative) to achieve an organizational outcome.
