Designer

About Pulse Trading Cards

Pulse Trading Cards specializes in designing striking, high-quality trading card products and immersive collector experiences for sports enthusiasts, athletes, and hobby fans. They focus on crafting unique trading card sets, developing creative product concepts, and enhancing existing releases, along with executing co-branded partnership projects involving card design, packaging, inserts, and print-ready materials.

Job Responsibilities

• Develop new trading card sets and products from initial concept stages through to print-ready delivery, including themes, visual aesthetics, set structure, card templates, inserts, packaging, and production files.
• Invent original card products and release ideas that convey a premium, collectible, and distinctive Pulse brand style.
• Approach each release holistically, constructing cohesive product ecosystems that can scale across card art, inserts, packaging, marketing materials, digital interfaces, retail presentation, and future adaptations.
• Refine current sets and products by enhancing layouts, advancing visual systems, broadening insert concepts, and evolving successful items for future editions.
• Translate co-branded partnership collaborations into polished, collector-focused card designs, packaging, and creative assets, harmonizing partner demands with a unique product identity.
• Create designs for base cards, autograph concepts, chase inserts, parallel versions, packaging components, and product presentation collateral.
• Rapidly produce conceptual directions, transitioning from preliminary ideas and visual experimentation to polished, presentation-quality creative work.
• Design scalable product systems adaptable across athletes, teams, partners, SKUs, formats, print variations, campaigns, and subsequent releases while maintaining visual originality.
• Produce production-ready designs including properly prepared files, templates, dielines, bleeds, colors, finishes, and materials compatible with vendors.
• Collaborate with Creative Director, product management, marketing, and executive teams to align creative solutions with release objectives, partner inputs, and business priorities.
• Contribute to brand marketing efforts including launch promotions, website/e-commerce graphics, email campaigns, social media visuals, retail materials, and related promotional content linked to product launches.
• Ensure final assets adhere to brand standards, fulfill collector expectations, satisfy product specifications, and meet print production criteria.

Required Qualifications and Experience

• Minimum five years of professional design experience within agencies, studios, in-house teams, or product design roles, demonstrated through a portfolio emphasizing strong visual artistry, print design, concept development, and execution skills.
• Expertise with Adobe Creative Suite, particularly Illustrator and Photoshop.
• Proven knowledge of print design elements such as bleeds, dielines, CMYK color processes, spot colors, specialty finishes like foils, paper stocks, proofing procedures, prepress workflows, and vendor coordination.
• Excellent visual design abilities encompassing typography, visual hierarchy, layout composition, textural use, color mastery, and meticulous attention to detail.
• Systematic design mindset capable of creating unified visual languages extending across entire card sets, diverse product types, packaging styles, marketing platforms, and partner applications.
• Capacity to maintain balance between cohesive identity and adaptability, ensuring each release remains distinct while aligned with production, branding, and business constraints.
• Ability to thrive in dynamic, fast-paced product development cycles featuring shifting timelines and multiple simultaneous releases, consistently upholding quality standards.
• Strong creative decision-making skills to reconcile premium design quality, collector appeal, partner specifications, production realities, and business goals.
• Receptive to guidance, proactive in idea contribution, adept at rapid iteration, delivering meticulous craftsmanship from concept stages through final implementation.

Additional Desirable Skills

• Experience designing trading cards, collectibles, packaging, licensed merchandise, sports or entertainment products, or consumer goods.
• Keen interest and understanding of advanced AI models and agents for enhancing workflow consistency and efficiency.
• Deep familiarity with sports, trading card culture, collector behaviors, chase features, parallels, inserts, autographs, and hobby community insights.
• History of working on co-branded or licensed partnership projects.
• Skills in motion graphics, video editing, or 3D design, including tools such as After Effects, Premiere, Blender, Cinema 4D, or equivalents.

Benefits

• Competitive salary package
• Dental insurance coverage
• Flexible work schedule
• Complimentary food and snacks
• Health insurance benefits
• Opportunities for career growth and advancement
• Paid time off
• Training and professional development programs
• Vision insurance benefits

Additional Information

This position reports directly to the Creative Director. The role supports hybrid working arrangements from the New Jersey office or fully remote options depending on candidate suitability.