Senior Art Director

This is a senior role and we are not opening a junior version of it. We are looking for someone who has already run visual output across a brand or a publication and is ready to do it across all of ours.

Aposto is an independent media company. We publish newsletters, a website, a mobile app, and a print paper, we produce video, and we run events. Our editorial philosophy is simple: gürültüden uzaklaş. Cut through the noise. Everything we make is built on the idea that people want less, chosen better.

That philosophy is easy to state and hard to hold across eight verticals, four platforms, and a production calendar that does not stop. We are looking for the person who holds it.

The role

You own how Aposto looks. All of it.

That means the obvious surfaces: social, newsletter design, the site, the app, print, event collateral. It also means the ones that are usually left to drift: how our video is graded and titled, how our photography is shot and selected, what our YouTube productions look like frame by frame, what a sponsored campaign looks like when a client's brand meets ours.

Aposto has eight verticals, and each one has its own character. Gündem does not look like Duende. Pareto does not look like Sprezza. Your job is not to flatten them into one template. It is to make sure that someone who reads all eight can tell they come from the same house, and that someone who reads one never feels they are looking at a house style stretched over content it does not fit.

You will not be doing this alone, and you will not be inheriting a department either. We have graphic design interns, videographers, and motion designers in house, and a bench of freelancers we bring in per project. You direct all of it. You write the brief, you review what comes back, and you decide when something is not ready to go out. Formal reporting lines stay where they are for now and can move to you as the role settles, but creative authority over visual output is yours from the first week.

Day to day, you sit with productions and editorial rather than off to one side. You are in the room when an episode is being planned and when an issue is being laid out, and you are the person everyone asks: which weight, which crop, does this thumbnail work, can we break the grid here. Answering those questions quickly, and answering them consistently, is most of what keeps our output looking like one company rather than eleven people with good intentions.

Our taste runs toward restraint. We are more interested in typography, whitespace, and a well chosen photograph than in effects. If your portfolio is built on maximalism, this is probably not your role, and that is a compliment to your portfolio.

What you'll own

• The brand system: guidelines for Aposto and for each vertical, and the harder job of making sure they are actually applied rather than filed
• Social output across our accounts. Format, grid, typography, motion, and the standard that things get held to before they go out
• Editorial design across newsletters, the site, the app, and print
• Video direction: our YouTube productions, short form, titles, grading, thumbnails, and the visual grammar that makes an episode recognisably ours from the first three seconds
• Photography. Commissioning, art directing shoots, building and maintaining a library, and defining the look we want rather than accepting what comes back
• Commercial work with the account and sales teams. Branded campaigns still have to look like Aposto, and part of your job is protecting that in rooms where a client has their own guidelines
• Creative sign off on visual work across the company. You review, you give notes, and you hold the line on what ships
• The design system itself: components, templates, type scales, colour, and the working files that let other people produce on brand without asking you first. Building it is the project. Keeping it alive as we launch new things is the job
• Daily support to productions and editorial. Sitting in planning, unblocking design questions in hours rather than days, and being reachable when a shoot or an issue is in motion
• The freelance bench: who is on it, what they are good for, how they are briefed, what we pay, and how the schedule holds together when four projects need the same person in the same week
• Mentoring our design interns and junior contributors. Much of this job is teaching people to see the difference between fine and right
• New product and vertical launches, from identity through to first issue

What we're looking for

• Seven or more years in design or art direction, in publishing, an agency, a studio, or a brand with real visual output, including time spent setting direction rather than executing someone else's
• A portfolio that shows range across media. We need to see print or editorial layout as well as digital, and ideally some moving image
• Command of type. This is the thing we will look at first
• Experience directing other people's work, including freelancers you did not hire and juniors who do not report to you. Being able to explain why something is not working, in a way that makes the next version better, matters as much as being able to fix it yourself
• Fluency in Figma and Adobe Creative Suite, including InDesign for print and After Effects or Premiere for motion
• Native Turkish and strong professional English. Turkish typography has its own problems and you should have opinions about them
• The ability to work at two speeds. Some of what we make is a considered quarterly print issue. Some of it is a social post that has to be out in forty minutes and still cannot look careless

Nice to have

• Experience in a newsroom or publication, where the calendar is not negotiable
• Photography or film background of your own
• Interest in what we cover: culture, economics, food, design, the things our verticals are built on
• A point of view on where visual media is going that is more interesting than ours