225 creative
director jobs,
read properly.

How the set was built

1,032 ads in. 149 read line by line.

Three job boards, six search terms — creative director, design lead, design director, head of design, art director, brand design director. Then I stripped out the construction industry, which floods any “design manager” search with site roles that have nothing to do with this work.

Two denominators run through this page, and I have labelled which is which on every chart. Location, salary, employer and work-arrangement figures use all 225 relevant ads. Tool and task figures use only the 149 whose full description I could read — you cannot count a word in an ad body you never retrieved.

Where the work is · 225 ads

Two cities hold two thirds of it.

Sydney and Melbourne together account for 152 of 225 roles. Brisbane is a real third market rather than a rounding error, which is the finding that matters to me. Perth, Adelaide and Canberra barely register.

Salary · 121 ads stating a number

Median $107,500.

Half of these roles advertise between $87,500 and $130,000. The full spread runs from $37,483 to $315,000, so the outliers are doing real work on the average — the median is the honest number here, not the mean.

Median by city · annualised roles only

Sydney pays $16,000 more than Brisbane at the median. Worth knowing before you assume the southern cities are where the money is — that gap is smaller than the rent difference.

Hourly and day-rate contracts are excluded — annualising them invents a number the ad never offered. Cities shown where at least five ads state a salary. Brisbane’s true median is $99,999.50, rounded here.

Work arrangement · 196 ads that say

Fully remote is 11%.

This is the number I did not want to find. Hybrid has won, on-site is holding, and genuinely remote creative leadership is one role in nine. A further 29 ads never state an arrangement at all, and I have left those out rather than guess.

Tools named in the ad · 149 full descriptions

Adobe still runs the country.

Every prediction that Figma would take this market is early. Adobe appears in more than a third of ads, and its three core apps each outrank Figma on their own. The two that surprised me sit lower down: Canva beats After Effects, and generative AI is now named in more ads than HTML.

What they ask you to do · 149 full descriptions

The top skill isn’t a craft skill.

Working across teams is named in 62% of ads — more than concepting, more than campaigns, and roughly three times more than typography. Read down the list and the pattern is blunt: these are jobs about carrying an idea through other people. The craft is assumed.

The part that is about me

Nine of the ten most-wanted tools are already on my CV.

I ran my own capability list against the market’s. This is the whole reason I built the dataset — not to describe the market, but to find out where I actually sit in it.

Where I fall short

Two things come up often enough to name. Retail and in-store design appears in 28% of ads and packaging in 18%; neither is a strength of mine. I have done fabrication, exhibition and event build at Zstudios, which is adjacent, but it is not the same as a retail rollout and I am not going to pretend otherwise.

The one I do not have at all is Canva, in 14% of ads. That is an afternoon, not a gap.

Who is hiring · 188 employers across 225 ads

Almost nobody is hiring twice.

168 of 188 employers posted exactly one role. This is a long tail, not a market with a few big buyers — which means the job is findable but never concentrated, and a scattergun application strategy is the wrong shape for it.

What I take from it

Five things I did not know a week ago.