Art Director

Join the staff of a nonprofit independent publisher during an exciting period of growth and with a fiftieth anniversary on the horizon. This is a rare opportunity to join Heyday’s committed staff of twelve to support the creation of soulful books with lasting cultural importance. Our books are celebrated for their beautiful design, and we need a new steward for this crucial function.

About us: Heyday is an independent, nonprofit publisher founded in 1974 in Berkeley, California. Through twenty new books per year and a backlist of two hundred titles, we promote civic engagement and social justice, celebrate nature’s beauty, support California Indian cultural renewal, and explore the state’s rich history, culture, and influence.

About you: You are a self-directed, enthusiastic professional with an excellent eye and management experience. You are cool-headed, diplomatic, and supremely flexible. You can oversee a dynamic and iterative book production process: this involves collaborating with authors, editors, and third parties to ensure (and, at times, create) high-quality art programs; hiring and managing freelance designers, typesetters, illustrators, and cartographers; soliciting feedback from internal and external stakeholders throughout the design process; keeping projects on time and within budget; coordinating timely marketing collateral; and supervising our in-house Production Manager, who handles printing.

You are very organized and comfortable working on many projects simultaneously; you are good at seeing projects through, from their earliest conceptual stages to the nitty-gritty technical details of their home stretches. You have a personal stake in our mission and community, and you are attracted to the friendly, passionate, and purpose-driven atmosphere of a scrappy nonprofit. Experience in book publishing strongly preferred. Management experience and proficiency in Adobe Creative Cloud are musts; your own book design portfolio a plus. You are Bay Area–based. We have flexibility about hours and in-office work, but we expect regular to periodic presence in our Berkeley office. Our staff is fully vaccinated.

• Oversee the design, production, and visual content of our books, ensuring highest quality while keeping to schedules and budgets.
• Hire and manage freelance designers, typesetters, illustrators, and cartographers.
• Supervise our Production Manager and support his work to print our books.
• Advise on projects under consideration.
• Maintain and, if necessary, refresh company’s visual branding in collaboration with our Marketing Director and Publisher.