Fractional creative director · The Director
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 get back to running marketing. No search. No new headcount. Senior creative direction from day one.
From $7,500/mo · 3-month minimum · Available from Day 1
Book a Brand Fit Call →30 minutes. No pitch. A conversation about your brand's leadership gap.
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. (Need hands-on design too? The Plus tier adds it.) 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 can't yet justify a full-time creative director's salary and search.
Full-time Creative Director
Annual cost: Six-figure salary + benefits
Time to start: 3 to 6 month search
Brand continuity: High, if retained
Strategic depth: High
Flexibility: Low, fixed headcount cost
Accountability: One employee, dependent on retention
The Director (Fractional)
Annual cost: $90,000 to $144,000 (Core or Plus)
Time to start: Within two weeks
Brand continuity: High, the same senior creative director throughout
Strategic depth: High
Flexibility: High. Month-to-month after a 3-month minimum, scale up or down
Accountability: One accountable principal, full ownership
Agency or freelancer
Annual cost: Variable, with no single owner
Time to start: 1 to 4 weeks, no strategic ramp
Brand continuity: Low, with turnover and 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: the same senior creative director owns the outcome every time, with no account manager standing between the decision and the result.
The Director is $7,500/month at the Core tier, $12,000/month at the Plus tier or $18,750/month at the Lead tier.
Core
$7,500/mo
50 hours a month. Brand governance, creative direction, weekly strategy call, design reviews, vendor management. No hands-on production execution.
Plus
$12,000/mo
80 hours a month. Everything in Core plus hands-on design execution, campaign asset production and active creative development.
Lead
$18,750/mo
125 hours a month. Full ownership of your creative function.
Every tier starts with a 3-month minimum, then runs month-to-month. Core and Plus exit with 30 days' notice and Lead with 60. No annual lock-in. Every tier is billed monthly. Core runs $90,000 a year, 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. It's where decisions get made instead of deferred.
An async design review queue via Slack.
Feedback typically comes back within 24 to 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.
We turn around most asset-level requests (Plus tier) in 2 to 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-merger at a bank, credit union or RIA, managing brand integration across two identities with no one leading the creative decisions.
You run a commercial real estate firm or a financial institution that's past the freelancer stage but can't justify a full-time Creative Director.
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.
"Josh worked closely with me to rebrand every piece of collateral across the organization, often under very tight deadlines. He consistently delivered high-quality work while feeling like a real extension of our team."
Emily Crandall, VP of Marketing, Promera
"We used JA Design when we first got started. It was one of the best investments we've made."
Sheldon Bernard, A440 Management
17 yrs
of B2B brand work
13 yrs
longest client engagement
175
pursuit pieces in 20 months inside JLL
Seventeen years of B2B brand work, including brand work inside JLL's marketing organization. The longest of those relationships has run 13 years, because the client handed the creative decisions to someone whose only job is to get them right.
1. Book a Brand Fit Call.
30 minutes. We ask about the situation. You describe what's breaking.
2. Proposal and first invoice.
If it's right for both sides, we agree on scope and tier, then send a proposal with your fixed monthly fee and your first invoice. The Director is billed monthly. Nothing more complicated than that.
3. We start within two weeks.
No onboarding ramp, no long setup. Once you sign, the work starts right away.
Most Director clients begin within two weeks of the first conversation.
No. You can start at any point. A Brand Audit is recommended if you don't have a clear read on your current brand, because 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.
A freelance creative director delivers projects. A fractional creative director owns the standard: they set direction, review every vendor's work and stay accountable for the brand between projects. You're buying judgment and continuity, not hours.
Close to it. Those titles describe the same part-time senior role with different scope. A creative lead or art director usually directs the look of the work. A director of brand design or creative director also owns the brand system, the vendors and the standards. The Director covers the full scope.
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 $7,500/month for the Core tier (50 hours a month), $12,000/month for the Plus tier (80 hours a month) or $18,750/month for the Lead tier (125 hours a month, full ownership). Core comes to $90,000 a year, billed monthly, with no search, no onboarding ramp and no headcount cost.
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 a month on a monthly retainer, with no search, no onboarding ramp and no fixed headcount cost. A full-time hire requires a 3 to 6 month search, a six-figure salary and long-term commitment regardless of workload.
Is there a minimum contract length for The Director?
Yes, three months. After that every tier runs month-to-month. Core and Plus exit with 30 days' notice and Lead with 60. There is no annual contract.
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. That's typically commercial real estate firms and financial institutions 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.
Core $7,500/mo · Plus $12,000/mo · Lead $18,750/mo, billed monthly. How to start: 1. Book a Brand Fit Call (30 minutes, no pitch). 2. We send a proposal with your fixed monthly fee and your first invoice. 3. We start within two weeks.
Prefer email? Tell us what you want to work on and what success looks like, and we'll reply within 24 to 48 hours: hello@gotjadesign.com
