Designer

Location: Remote-first with occasional in-person collaboration in Norfolk, VA. We're prioritizing candidates who live within ~90 miles of Norfolk (Hampton Roads and the surrounding region). Sway Creative Labs is looking for a systems-minded Designer who can hold a concept and scale it — someone as comfortable setting the look of a campaign as building the Figma system that produces a hundred on-brand versions of it without losing the plot. This is a design role built for how work actually gets made now: high-volume, multi-channel, and social-first. A single launch can mean a full display network across every standard size, a social system that flexes to every platform, localized variants, and end frames — all of which have to feel designed, not resized. We want someone who treats scale as a design problem, builds templates and component systems in Figma to solve it, and reaches for Claude and AI tooling by default to move faster without dropping the quality bar. This is hands-on, in-the-trenches work at an independent shop. There is no production layer beneath you to hand the "boring" versions to — you design the system that makes the boring versions fast. In return you get real ownership of how our work looks and how it gets built, direct access to the people who decide, and a genuine hand in shaping our design and production infrastructure. We are looking for range over specialization: a designer with a real eye and a point of view, fluency in how social actually works, and the technical chops to build systems that scale. Video and animation are a plus, not a requirement. What You'll Own - Design & Art Direction - Set and execute the visual direction for campaigns across digital, social, display, print, and out-of-home - Design social-native creative built for each platform's format and pace, not adapted from a campaign master - Bring a point of view to concept development and push for the better execution when you see one - Templated Production Systems at Scale - Build large, inventory-style creative systems: full display unit sets, social unit systems, and localized or market-specific variants - Build and maintain reusable Figma component libraries, variants, auto-layout, and variables/tokens rather than one-off artboards - Turn approved concepts into template systems any team member can run without breaking the design - Version, name, and organize files to convention so the right asset is always findable - AI-Accelerated Design - Use Claude and AI-assisted tooling as a core part of your workflow: generating and populating variants, drafting layout and copy options, automating repetitive build steps, and running QA passes - Write prompts specific enough to get usable output, and hold the quality line — AI output that only looks good at a glance does not ship - Bring new tools and techniques back to the team rather than keeping the shortcut to yourself - Social & Channel Fluency - Design for Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube, and emerging formats with an eye for what actually performs - Work at social speed when a moment is live, and to campaign standards when it counts - Motion & Video (a plus, not required