About Pulse Trading Cards
Pulse Trading Cards creates bold, premium trading card products and collector experiences for sports fans, athletes, and hobby culture. We’re looking for an experienced Designer to help create new trading card sets, develop product concepts, evolve existing releases, and bring co-branded partnership projects to life through card design, packaging, inserts, and print-ready product systems.
This role is primarily focused on designing net-new trading card products and set experiences from concept through production. You’ll help define the look, feel, structure, and visual language of our releases across base cards, inserts, autograph cards, chase elements, packaging, sell sheets, and related product assets. Each product should feel like a distinct collector experience with its own identity, while being flexible enough to extend across future releases, formats, campaigns, and sales channels.
What you’ll do
- Design new trading card sets and products from concept through print delivery, including themes, visual systems, set architecture, card templates, inserts, packaging, and production-ready files.
- Create net-new card products and release concepts, developing visual directions that feel premium, collectible, ownable, and aligned with the Pulse brand.
- Think systematically about each release, building cohesive product worlds that can scale across card designs, inserts, packaging, marketing assets, digital touchpoints, retail needs, and future extensions.
- Iterate on existing sets and product lines, refining layouts, improving visual systems, expanding insert concepts, and helping evolve successful products into stronger future releases.
- Bring co-branded partnership deals to life through card design, packaging, and related product creative, translating partner requirements into compelling collector-facing products that still feel distinct, polished, and ownable.
- Design base cards, autograph layouts, chase inserts, parallels, packaging elements, and product presentation materials.
- Build concept directions quickly, moving from rough ideas and visual exploration to polished, presentation-ready creative.
- Develop scalable product systems that work across athletes, teams, partners, SKUs, formats, print variations, campaign needs, and future release extensions while maintaining a clear and unique visual identity.
- Prepare production-ready design handoff, including print files, templates, dielines, bleeds, color setup, finishes, and vendor-ready assets.
- Partner with the Creative Director, product, marketing, and leadership teams to translate release goals, partner needs, and business priorities into clear creative solutions.
- Support brand and marketing creative as needed, including launch assets, web/e-commerce graphics, email, social, retail materials, and promotional design connected to product releases.
- Review final deliverables to ensure they meet brand standards, collector expectations, product requirements, and print production standards.
What you bring
- 5+ years of professional design experience in-house, studio, agency, or product-focused creative environments, with a portfolio showing strong visual craft, print design, concept development, and production execution.
- Advanced proficiency in Adobe Creative Suite, especially Illustrator and Photoshop.
- Strong experience designing for print, including bleeds, dielines, CMYK workflows, spot colors, foils, stocks, finishes, proofing, prepress, and vendor handoff.
- Strong visual design skills, including typography, hierarchy, layout, composition, texture, color, and attention to detail.
- A systems-minded approach to design, with the ability to create cohesive visual languages that can extend across full card sets, multiple product types, packaging formats, marketing channels, and partner applications.
- Ability to balance consistency and flexibility, ensuring each release has a strong identity while still working within production, brand, and business requirements.
- Comfort working across fast-moving product cycles, shifting timelines, and multiple releases while maintaining a high standard of quality.
- Strong creative judgment, with the ability to balance premium design, collector appeal, partner requirements, production realities, and business goals.
- Ability to take direction, contribute ideas, iterate quickly, and bring a high level of craft to both concept development and final execution.
Bonus points
- Experience designing trading cards, collectibles, packaging, licensed products, sports products, entertainment products, or consumer goods.
- A deep understanding and interest in frontier AI models/agents, and how to apply them to increase workflow consistency and efficiency.
- A strong understanding of sports, trading card culture, collector behavior, chase mechanics, parallels, inserts, autographs, and what hobby audiences notice.
- Experience with co-branded or licensed partnership work.
- Motion, video, or 3D skills, including After Effects, Premiere, Blender, Cinema 4D, or similar tools.
Role details
Location: Hybrid in our New Jersey office, or remote for the right candidate
Reports to: Creative Director