The Director · Fractional Creative Direction
If you're the one approving every asset, breaking every design tie, and managing every freelancer relationship, you're doing the job of a Creative Director on top of your own. A fractional creative director takes that job back — the brand decisions, the vendor management, the design reviews — so you can go back to running marketing. No search. No $200K salary. No new headcount.
From $6,000/mo · No long-term contract · Available from Day 1
Book a Discovery Call →This is a conversation about your brand's leadership gap, not a sales pitch.
The 5pm Slack message.
"Is this on-brand?" lands in your inbox an hour before a deadline, from someone who needs an answer now, and you're the only person qualified — or available — to give it.
The freelancer who followed every instruction and still missed.
The files are technically correct. Fonts match. Colors are right. It still doesn't look like your brand, and you can't quite explain why in a way that gets fixed next time.
The quarterly review that finds six blues.
Sales has one deck. Product has another. The regional office built its own. Nobody owns the brand system, so everybody's building their own version of it.
This isn't a bandwidth problem. It's a leadership gap.
A fractional creative director is a senior creative leader who owns your brand's creative decisions and standards on a part-time, retainer basis — without the salary, equity, or full-time seat of an in-house hire. They do the job a Creative Director does; they just do it for several hours a week instead of forty.
In practice, that means five things: owning brand decisions so they don't default to committee, governing consistency across every team and vendor touching the brand, managing the freelancers and agencies actually producing the work, running the design reviews that used to land on your desk, and setting the creative strategy behind campaigns and launches.
What they don't do: project management, task tracking, or hands-on production of every asset. That's execution work, and it belongs to a different role, a different retainer, or a different hire. A fractional creative director's job is judgment, not throughput.
This isn't a cheaper version of a full-time hire. It's a different structure, built for a company that has outgrown freelancers but hasn't outgrown the need to justify a $200K salary.
Full-Time Creative Director
Annual cost: $175,000–$270,000 + benefits
Time to start: 3–6 month search
Brand continuity: High, if retained
Strategic depth: High
Flexibility: Low — fixed headcount cost
Accountability: One person, full ownership
The Director (Fractional)
Annual cost: $72,000–$108,000/yr
Time to start: Day 1
Brand continuity: High — one senior person throughout
Strategic depth: High
Flexibility: High — month-to-month, scale up or down
Accountability: One person, full ownership
Agency or Freelancer
Annual cost: Variable, often $100K+ with no ownership
Time to start: 1–4 weeks, no strategic ramp
Brand continuity: Low — turnover, rotating staff
Strategic depth: Low to moderate, execution-focused
Flexibility: Moderate — project-based
Accountability: Diffused across account team
The math favors fractional. The accountability argument favors it more: one senior person owns the outcome, every time, with no account manager standing between the decision and the result.
The Director is $6,000/month at the Core tier, or $9,000/month at the Plus tier.
Core
$6,000/mo
10 hours/week. Brand governance, creative direction, weekly strategy call, design reviews, vendor management. No hands-on production execution.
Plus
$9,000/mo
20 hours/week. Everything in Core plus hands-on design execution, campaign asset production, and active creative development.
Both tiers run month-to-month, with 30 days to exit. No annual lock-in, no long-term contract. At either tier, you save $80,000+ annually compared to a full-time Creative Director — with no hiring search, no onboarding ramp, and no headcount risk.
A weekly 1-hour strategy and planning call.
Same time, same person, every week — where decisions get made instead of deferred.
An async design review queue via Slack.
Feedback typically comes back within 24–48 hours, not whenever someone gets to it.
Vendor and agency management handled directly.
No account manager relay, no message getting softened or lost on the way to the person who actually needs to hear it.
Most asset-level requests (Plus tier) turned around in 2–5 business days.
Fast enough to keep campaigns moving without sacrificing the judgment behind them.
No account managers. No handoffs. You have direct access to the same senior person every time.
Hire a fractional creative director when your company has outgrown ad hoc freelance work but can't yet justify — or doesn't want to risk — a six-figure full-time creative hire. Specifically:
You're a CMO or VP Marketing currently doing two jobs: your own, and a Creative Director role nobody assigned you.
You're post-acquisition, managing brand integration across two identities with no one leading the creative decisions.
You run a $50M–$500M company that can't justify a $200K+ full-time CD but is clearly past the freelancer stage.
Your brand looks different every quarter because there's no one governing it.
You're entering a new market, launching a product, or heading into a fundraising round and need creative leadership now, not in six months.
You're a founder who has personally been the brand's creative director for a decade and needs to hand it off without losing what made it work.
This isn't for you if you need a full-time employee physically in a building every day, or if you're looking for the cheapest possible design labor rather than senior judgment.
"Regardless of the scope, Josh shows up the same way: senior, fast, accountable."
— Laura Knight, SVP Patient Solutions, Morrison Healthcare
"We used JA Design when we first got started — it was one of the best investments we've made."
— Sheldon Bernard, A440 Management
$80K+
saved annually vs. full-time CD
2.3 yrs
average engagement
60%
of clients expand within 6 months
Clients including JLL, MetLife, MassMutual, Brighthouse Financial, AXA Equitable, Texas Capital, Duke Energy, AvidXchange, Compass Group, and AlphaSights have handed the creative decisions to someone whose only job is to get them right.
Discovery call.
30 minutes. Josh asks about the situation. You describe what's breaking.
Fit confirmation.
If it's right for both sides, scope and tier get agreed on — nothing more complicated than that.
Day 1.
No onboarding ramp, no long setup. The engagement starts working immediately.
Most Director clients begin within two weeks of the first conversation.
No. You can enter at any point. A Brand Audit is recommended if you don't have a clear read on your current brand state — it gives The Director a cleaner foundation to govern from day one. If a brand system doesn't fully exist yet, a Brand Sprint first means The Director governs a built system instead of building one while also governing it. But neither is a prerequisite. Plenty of clients start with The Director directly and build the rest as they go.
What is a fractional creative director?
A fractional creative director is a senior creative leader who takes ownership of your brand's creative decisions, standards, and vendor relationships on a part-time retainer basis, rather than as a full-time employee. They provide the same judgment and accountability as an in-house Creative Director without the salary, equity, or full-time seat.
How much does a fractional creative director cost?
The Director is priced at $6,000/month for the Core tier (10 hours/week) or $9,000/month for the Plus tier (20 hours/week). That compares to $175,000–$270,000 a year plus benefits for a full-time Creative Director, meaning most clients save $80,000 or more annually.
What does a fractional creative director do?
They own brand decisions, govern consistency across teams and vendors, manage freelancers and agencies, run design reviews, and lead creative strategy for campaigns and launches. They do not perform project management, administrative tasks, or high-volume production work — that belongs to a different role.
How is a fractional creative director different from a full-time creative director?
The role and the judgment are the same. The structure is different. A fractional creative director works a defined number of hours per week on a month-to-month retainer, with no search, no onboarding ramp, and no fixed headcount cost. A full-time hire requires a 3–6 month search, a six-figure salary, and long-term commitment regardless of workload.
Is there a minimum contract length for The Director?
No. The Director runs month-to-month with 30 days notice to exit. There is no annual contract and no long-term lock-in.
When should you hire a fractional creative director?
Hire one when your company has outgrown ad hoc freelance work but can't yet justify a full-time Creative Director salary — typically $50M–$500M companies where the CMO or VP Marketing has become the default creative decision-maker, where brand consistency has broken down across teams, or where a launch, acquisition, or fundraising round demands creative leadership immediately.
Does The Director work with our existing vendors and agencies?
Yes. Vendor and agency management is a core part of the engagement. The Director works directly with your existing freelancers, design vendors, and agency partners — reviewing their work, directing their briefs, and holding them to the brand standard — with no account manager relay in between.
Every hour you spend refereeing a design debate or approving a freelancer's file is an hour spent doing a job you never signed up for — one that a senior creative leader should own instead. The Director exists to take that job back, starting this month, without a search or a six-figure salary.
Book a Discovery Call →Or email hello@gotjadesign.com with a description of what you are looking to work on and what success looks like and we will contact you within 24-48 hours.
