Creative Director – Product & Building Design

Location: Nova Scotia, Canada

Company: Playwell Bricks Design Studio Limited

Position: Full-Time

About Playwell Bricks

Playwell Bricks Design Studio creates custom building-brick products for companies, organizations, collectors, and brands around the world.

We transform products, buildings, vehicles, mascots, ideas, and stories into engaging physical building experiences. Our work combines creative design, engineering, graphic design, packaging, instruction development, sourcing, and production to create products capable of being manufactured from hundreds to thousands of units.

As Playwell Bricks continues to grow, we are looking for an experienced creative leader to help define the next generation of our products and establish the creative standards that will guide our design team.

The Role

We are seeking a Creative Director – Product & Building Design to lead the creative development of Playwell Bricks’ physical products.

This is not purely a management position.

The Creative Director will remain actively involved in designing, prototyping, building, reviewing, and improving products while also providing creative leadership to our growing team of designers.

The successful candidate will be equally comfortable developing a building-brick model at their desk, reviewing another designer’s work, presenting a concept to a client, working through a production challenge, or establishing the creative direction for an entire product line.
You will ultimately be responsible for helping ensure that every Playwell Bricks product meets a consistently high standard for design, building experience, visual presentation, manufacturability, and creativity.

Key Responsibilities

Creative Direction & Leadership

• Establish and maintain creative and product-design standards across Playwell Bricks.
• Provide creative direction throughout the complete product-development process.
• Lead, mentor, and develop building-brick and graphic designers.
• Review designs and provide clear, constructive, and actionable creative feedback.
• Establish design-review and approval processes that maintain quality while allowing designers creative freedom.
• Help identify, recruit, evaluate, and onboard new design talent.
• Foster a collaborative environment where designers are encouraged to experiment, challenge assumptions, and develop new building techniques.
• Take final creative responsibility for the quality and consistency of products released by the design team.

Building-Brick Design

• Design complex building-brick models both digitally and physically.
• Translate real-world products, vehicles, architecture, characters, brands, and abstract concepts into compelling building-brick models.
• Develop models that balance aesthetics, accuracy, structural integrity, building experience, piece count, component availability, and cost.
• Develop and evaluate new building techniques and construction solutions.
• Review and improve designs created by other members of the team.
• Develop physical prototypes and conduct iterative testing and refinement.
• Ensure models can be reliably reproduced in commercial production quantities.

Commercial Product Development

Lead and contribute to products throughout the complete development cycle:

Client Brief → Concept → Design → Prototype → Costing → Testing → Instructions → Packaging → Production

The Creative Director will be expected to:

• Translate client objectives into practical and creative product specifications.
• Establish piece-count, size, complexity, and design parameters.
• Design within target manufacturing and project budgets.
• Optimize designs and Bills of Materials (BOMs) for cost, availability, and production.
• Identify unnecessary complexity and develop more efficient design solutions.
• Evaluate component availability and potential sourcing challenges.
• Design products for repeatable assembly and commercial-scale production.
• Work collaboratively with sourcing and production teams.
• Review production samples and resolve design-related manufacturing issues.
• Help establish internal design-for-manufacturing standards.

Building Experience

A Playwell Bricks product must be more than an attractive finished model.

The Creative Director will be responsible for considering the complete customer building experience, including:

• Logical build progression.
• Structural stability throughout the build.
• Appropriate complexity for the intended audience.
• Component identification.
• Build sequencing.
• Repetition and unnecessary complexity.
• Instruction clarity.
• Playability or functionality where appropriate.
• Presentation of the completed model.

Products should be designed from the beginning with both the builder and the finished model in mind.

Product Testing & Compliance

• Ensure products are designed with applicable consumer-product safety requirements in mind.
• Work with production and external testing partners to identify appropriate testing requirements.
• Understand and account for applicable North American and international product and toy safety standards.
• Incorporate testing requirements into the design process rather than treating compliance as a final-stage consideration.
• Review potential design, component, labeling, packaging, and age-grading considerations.
• Maintain appropriate product-development documentation.

Client Collaboration

• Participate in client discovery and creative-development meetings.
• Translate client ideas into achievable product concepts.
• Present concepts, prototypes, and design recommendations to clients.
• Clearly explain the reasoning behind creative and technical decisions.
• Identify when a client’s requested approach may negatively affect cost, structural integrity, building experience, manufacturability, or product quality and recommend alternatives.
• Incorporate client feedback without compromising fundamental product-design standards.

Project & Production Management

• Manage multiple concurrent design projects and priorities.
• Establish realistic creative-development timelines.
• Coordinate design deliverables with sales, sourcing, production, graphic design, and client teams.
• Identify design risks early in the development process.
• Ensure designs reach production-ready status according to project schedules.
• Help develop scalable internal systems as Playwell Bricks’ design volume grows.

Required Qualifications

Candidates should have:

• A minimum of 5 years of professional retail or consumer-product design experience, preferably working with or for a recognized major consumer brand.
• Demonstrated experience taking physical products from initial concept through commercial production.
• Professional experience designing products intended to be manufactured at scale.
• Professional graphic design experience.
• High proficiency in both digital and physical building-brick design.
• An exceptional understanding of building techniques, structural integrity, geometry, scale, colour, and component usage.
• Experience designing within cost, component, manufacturing, and production constraints.
• Experience with design-for-manufacturing principles.
• Experience developing and evaluating physical prototypes.
• Familiarity with Bills of Materials, component management, and product costing.
• Familiarity with applicable consumer-product testing and compliance requirements.
• Experience working within multidisciplinary creative or product-development teams.
• Experience providing creative direction, mentorship, or leadership to other designers.
• Strong project-management and organizational skills.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills.
• Strong presentation skills and the ability to explain creative decisions to clients and non-designers.
• Exceptional attention to detail.

Preferred Experience

Particular consideration will be given to candidates with experience in:

• Construction toys or building systems.
• Major toy companies.
• Collectibles or model kits.
• Premium consumer products.
• Building-instruction development.
• Component sourcing and BOM optimization.
• Injection-moulded consumer products.
• International manufacturing.
• Working directly with factories, suppliers, printers, or packaging manufacturers.
• North American and international toy-safety standards.
• Managing or mentoring multidisciplinary creative teams.
• Developing products for corporate or promotional clients.
• Intellectual-property, licensing, or brand-guideline compliance.

Experience with professional graphic-design software and digital building or 3D-design platforms is strongly preferred.

The Person We’re Looking For

We are looking for someone who understands the difference between creating an impressive model and creating a successful commercial building product.

An exceptional building-brick designer can create something beautiful.
An exceptional product designer can create something beautiful that can also be manufactured 1,000 times, stays within budget, uses obtainable components, provides an enjoyable building experience, can be clearly documented, survives handling, meets applicable testing requirements, and arrives with the customer exactly as intended.

We need someone who can do both.
You should enjoy solving creative problems within real-world constraints and understand that limitations involving piece count, cost, availability, manufacturing, packaging, and deadlines are part of the design challenge rather than barriers to creativity.

Location & Relocation

This position is based in Nova Scotia, Canada.

The successful candidate must be willing and able to relocate to Nova Scotia and work collaboratively with the Playwell Bricks team.

Application Requirements

Applicants should provide:

• Resume/CV.
• Professional product-design portfolio.
• Building-brick design portfolio.
• Examples of graphic-design, packaging, or instruction-design work.
• Examples of products they have helped take from concept through commercial production.
• A brief explanation of their personal responsibilities on major collaborative portfolio projects.

For collaborative projects, applicants should clearly distinguish between work they personally completed and work completed by other members of the project team.

Selection Process

Shortlisted candidates should expect the selection process to include a practical product-design exercise.

Candidates may be provided with a representative client brief containing constraints such as:

• Target piece count.
• Target production cost.
• Product dimensions.
• Branding requirements.
• Intended audience.
• Component restrictions.
• Production quantity.
• Project deadline.

Candidates will be asked to develop and present a proposed solution.

The exercise is intended to evaluate more than the appearance of the finished model. We are interested in understanding how you think: how you prioritize requirements, make trade-offs, solve structural challenges, manage cost, consider the building experience, and translate a commercial brief into a product that can actually be produced.

Why Playwell Bricks

This is an opportunity to have a significant influence on the creative direction of a growing design studio.
Rather than working on one narrow part of the product-development process, you will have the opportunity to help shape products from the earliest idea through to the moment the finished product reaches the customer.

You will also help establish the design standards, processes, team, and creative culture that will define the next stage of Playwell Bricks.