Art Director

About the Studio:
VMI is an award-winning agency producing stunning visual imagery, animations, and virtual reality experiences that enthrall and engage viewers. We fully immerse ourselves in understanding our customers' motivations and translating them into something effective that is elegant, beautiful, and truly different. Our mission is to create disruptive and exciting customer experiences through technology that evokes genuine emotion and impact.

Growing at pace, we have an amazing team of dedicated professionals with a strong culture built around doing great work and having fun whilst doing it. We have bold ambitions for
2025
and are looking for a talented Art Director to help us grow.

Job Overview:
Contract Type:
Fixed Term Contract - 6 Months

Location:
Oval London (Minimum 3 days in-studio)

Reports into:
Creative Director

We're looking for a multidisciplinary
Art Director
to join our team at
VMI Studio
, working directly with the
Creative Director
to bring innovative ideas to life across film, immersive media, web, and CGI. You'll be central to shaping creative concepts and turning them into compelling visual narratives—combining strong storytelling, sharp art direction, UX/UI skills, and a passion for design in the built environment.

This role sits at the intersection of
film, web, and animation
, ideal for someone who's as comfortable sketching out a UX flow in Figma as they are storyboarding a cinematic sequence or crafting moodboards that capture a client's vision.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead art direction for projects across immersive film, web (UX/UI), CGI, and animation, ensuring a cohesive and impactful visual language.
• Collaborate with the Creative Director and Producers to translate narratives and ideas into visual concepts.
• Develop moodboards, styleframes, previsualizations, and visual treatments for pitches and live projects.
• Shape and iterate UI/UX designs in Figma, ensuring they're intuitive, elegant, and align with the creative narrative.
• Write copy and conceptual language for client presentations and visual deliverables.
• Support editing and assembling rough cuts in Premiere Pro or After Effects to visualize ideas for internal and client review.
• Work closely with clients to understand their brand, vision, and objectives, and reflect these in the creative outputs.
• Participate in client presentations, reviews, and feedback loops during all stages of production.
• Communicate visual direction clearly and efficiently to the production team, managing the creative output from concept to delivery.
• Help identify and resolve creative or design gaps across various media formats.
• Guide teams during reviews, ensuring quality and consistency across all visual outputs.

What We're Looking For:

• 4+ years of experience as an Art Director, Visual Designer, or similar, preferably within a creative studio, agency, or production environment.
• Proven experience across film, animation, and UX/UI design.
• Excellent visual storytelling skills, with the ability to define and evolve visual languages across different formats.
• Proficiency in Adobe Creative Suite, especially Premiere Pro, After Effects and Photoshop, and Figma for UI/UX.
• Experience working with animation or live-action projects is a plus.
• A sharp eye for detail, composition, typography, and motion.
• Strong communication and presentation skills—confident working with clients and internal teams.
• Comfortable working across multiple projects in a fast-paced, creative environment.

Nice to Haves:

• Experience in real-time engines (Unreal Engine)
• Background or interest in architecture, spatial design, or the built environment
• Familiarity with scriptwriting or narrative development

VMI offers:

• Unlimited PTO
• Gym Membership
• £400 personal training budget to use for work-related training
• Regular team lunches and evenings out
• Pension scheme

Salary Pay Range

£48,000—£60,000 GBP

About Journey:
Journey is a global design and innovation studio pioneering multidimensional experiences (MDX) that transform how people perceive, engage, and interact with the world. With studios in New York, London, Miami, and Dubai, we blend strategy, design, technology, and narrative to create sensory-rich journeys that ignite emotion and deepen connections between people, brands, and culture.

Journey was formed in 2022 by visionary leaders who refuse to accept limits. United through the acquisitions of award-winning studios ICRAVE, Squint/Opera, 59, and VMI Studio, together, we form something new: a multidimensional design practice with unparalleled expertise across the physical, immersive, and digital realms.

But we're so much more than a combination of acquisitions; we're a revolutionary framework of layered design capabilities akin to the layers of a technology stack for software companies. Like the best technology stacks, our framework continuously evolves to embrace new capabilities and creative possibilities with the future of the human experience at the forefront. This game-changing framework, the Journey Experience Stack, allows us to design for every touchpoint and create uncommonly cohesive brand universes, drawing on our collective expertise in interior design, lighting design, media design, interactive design, and content creation to deliver industry-first solutions for entertainment, healthcare, retail, hospitality, real estate, and cultural institutions.

No other full-service studio practices multidimensional design or vertically integrates its experience capabilities with this level of sophistication. Whether we're reimagining the hospital-patient relationship, creating the world's most immersive entertainment venue, revolutionizing live theater, or crafting virtual twins that accelerate ideas' passage from vision to reality, Journey's work is pioneering the shift of how people perceive, engage, and interact with the world.