Senior Production Manager

Description: As Print Production Manager for Antiques Trade Gazette, you will lead and manage a small, experienced and skilled team to finalise and deliver our print and digital products.

You will be responsible for co-ordinating multiple tasks while liaising with key stakeholders including sales, editorial, marketing, IT and our external service providers. We work to tight deadlines that require flexibility to ensure all deadlines are met.

The role is very hands-on; as the manager you will be expected to take the lead in delivering skills sets across the production brief while offering expertise in ensuring optimisation of technical know-how and use of resources.

We have developed strong professional relationships with our external print and digital service providers and achieve high quality results at competitive rates. It will be your responsibility to maintain and nurture these relationships including optimisation of new technologies as they evolve, with a particular focus on opportunities to integrate artificial intelligence into processes.

You are someone who raises their game to meet challenges as they arise, you deliver calm and considered solutions having proactively assessed impacts across other departments, while leading your direct reports accordingly.

Your reward is to have taken an active role enabling a high quality and professionally produced product to be efficiently delivered each and every week.

Key Responsibilities:

1. Manage the production team plus freelancers and contractors.
2. Manage both the weekly print and digital production workflows.
3. Oversee all aspects of quality control from design through to delivery.
4. Provide layout for editorial pages and own the design of the templates.
5. Provide layout and creative design for advertisers.
6. Pre-flight print-ready PDFs.
7. Manage and co-ordinate the workflows of all internal advertising, editorial copy and images.
8. Manage and co-ordinate the workflows between third-party print partners, mailing distribution partners and digital service providers (App and e Paper).
9. Create promotional print and digital marketing assets.
10. Provide rigorous quality control throughout.
11. Maintain an archive of all ATG issues and supplements.
12. Take a leading role in optimising efficiencies across the production brief.
13. Adhere to and administrate budgets appropriately.
14. Liaise with internal and external suppliers and stakeholders.

Key Requirements:

1. Proven experience in leading and motivating a production team.
2. Extensive knowledge of our core production applications, specifically: Adobe Creative Suite - InDesign, Photoshop, Acrobat, Bridge, Illustrator.
3. Good working knowledge of Microsoft Outlook, Teams, Word, Excel, database packages, Slack, FileZilla, WeTransfer.
4. Knowledge of Canva and Intelligent Flatplan would be beneficial.
5. A thorough understanding of colour correction across multiple platforms.
6. Extensive knowledge of editorial page layout, templates and advertising design.
7. Creative leadership in design and branding.
8. IT literate with a good understanding of server architecture.
9. The ability to work at a fast pace and with the minimum of supervision, taking responsibility for your own and the team's activities.
10. A highly organised team player with a flexible approach to delivering a high-quality product to strict deadlines.
11. Strong written and verbal communicator who enjoys contact with clients and the satisfaction of bringing together in one place a unique set of information valued highly by thousands of market professionals.
12. Eye for detail, excellent spelling, grammar and proof-reading ability.
13. Reliability.