Motion Design Art Director - Interactive Retail

Aquent Studios is seeking an Art Director with hands-on motion design mastery to join a visionary team dedicated to redefining customer interaction within dynamic retail environments. In this role, you will drive the conceptualization and visual design for cutting-edge in-store interactive demonstrations and retail displays for a pioneering global tech innovator.

As the creative anchor for on-device and environmental retail experiences, you will bridge brand storytelling and kinetic design, leading a team of visual designers and motion artists from pitch to store deployment. While your primary focus is creative direction and concept development, you are a craft-first practitioner with soup-to-nuts fluency in the motion graphics and digital retail production pipeline, fully capable of building assets from scratch.

What You'll Do

• Creative Direction & Concepting: Establish the creative vision, narrative frameworks, and UI layouts for in-store interactive touch demos, companion screens, and ambient attract loops.
• Team Leadership & Mentorship: Direct and mentor visual designers and motion artists through fast-paced production cycles.
• Motion & Narrative Strategy: Translate complex software features, hardware innovations, and AI capabilities into kinetic, intuitive stories that hook foot traffic and drive product discovery.
• Hands-On Craft & Prototyping: Own concepts from blank canvas to prototype, developing high-fidelity storyboards, style frames, motion studies, and layout systems before delegating.
• Brand Stewardship: Apply global brand standards consistently across varied screen formats and retail environments.

Must-Have Qualifications

• Experience Level: Quality of execution and conceptual strength take precedence over years on paper. Ideal for a high-caliber mid-level Art Director or lead motion designer ready to expand their scope and guide a dedicated team.
• Concept-to-Execution Portfolio: A book showcasing both high-level conceptual leadership (messaging frameworks, narrative demos) and execution-level craftsmanship in motion graphics and interactive UI.
• Technical Motion Fluency: Solid grasp of the end-to-end motion graphics lifecycle-including storyboarding, animatics, keyframing, kinetic typography, screen aspect ratios, compression standards, and hardware performance limits.
• Core Tool Mastery: Advanced proficiency with Adobe Creative Cloud (After Effects, Illustrator, Photoshop, InDesign, Acrobat), Figma, and collaboration tools like Miro.