Pulse Trading Cards is redefining the hobby with premium, autograph-driven products that put collectors first. Based in New Jersey, we work directly with hundreds of top athletes to create bold, high-quality trading cards that connect fans to their favorite players. Our themed sets feature striking designs, rare parallels, and premium packaging—offering serious value at accessible price points. Built by collectors, for collectors, Pulse delivers more than just cards—we deliver the future of the hobby.

About Pulse Trading Cards

Pulse Trading Cards creates premium trading card products and collector experiences for sports fans, athletes, and hobby culture. We’re looking for a Junior Designer / Production Artist who is highly detail-oriented, organized, and comfortable working deep in print production.

This role is primarily focused on building, preparing, and production-managing trading card product files across cards, inserts, parallels, packaging, sell sheets, retail materials, and related printed collateral. You’ll work closely with the Creative Director and design team to turn approved creative systems into clean, accurate, production-ready files.

What you’ll do

• Build and prepare production files for trading card products, including base cards, inserts, autograph cards, parallels, checklists, packaging, retail displays, sell sheets, and supporting print collateral.
• Work within established card templates and product systems to create accurate card layouts across athletes, teams, partners, variants, SKUs, and release formats.
• Prepare print-ready files with precision, including bleeds, trim, safe zones, dielines, spot colors, foils, finishes, coatings, overprint settings, export specs, and vendor requirements.
• Execute high-volume production tasks such as copy swaps, image placement, layout updates, card backs, versioning, resizing, checklist updates, and print file exports.
• Process and retouch photography for card and packaging use, including color correction, cleanup, cutouts, masking, compositing basics, background removal, and preparing images to spec.
• Help maintain consistency across large card sets, ensuring typography, spacing, alignment, image treatment, logos, legal copy, numbering, and production details are accurate across all files.
• Package and organize working files, links, fonts, specs, references, proofs, and final exports so projects stay clean, searchable, and production-ready.
• Review files for quality and accuracy before handoff, checking for common print and production issues before they reach vendors.
• Support proofing rounds, spec checks, revision updates, and production handoff with print vendors as needed.
• Create occasional supporting marketing or digital assets from approved templates when connected to a product release, such as web graphics, email images, social graphics, or launch materials.

What you bring

• 2-3+ years of design and production experience with a portfolio that shows strong print, layout, production, or packaging-related work.
• Strong proficiency in Adobe Creative Suite, especially Illustrator and Photoshop.
• A solid understanding of print production fundamentals, including CMYK workflows, resolution, bleeds, trim, safe zones, dielines, spot colors, proofing, prepress, and vendor handoff.
• Experience preparing files for specialty print finishes, including foil, spot UV, embossing, debossing, die cuts, specialty stocks, laminates, coatings, and other production treatments.
• Strong attention to detail and a careful eye for alignment, spacing, typography, image quality, file setup, and production accuracy.
• Strong file hygiene, including clean layers, consistent naming, organized links, packaged files, version control, and accurate exports.
• Comfort working within established templates, design systems, and production guidelines while keeping quality high and turnaround efficient.
• Photo-editing fundamentals, including retouching, masking, cutouts, cleanup, compositing basics, and preparing images for print.
• Ability to manage repetitive, detail-heavy production work without losing accuracy or consistency.
• A collaborative mindset and willingness to take direction, ask good questions, and help keep projects moving smoothly.

Bonus points

• Experience with trading cards, collectibles, packaging, sports products, entertainment products, consumer goods, or retail print production.
• 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, inserts, parallels, autographs, packaging, and the small details collectors notice.
• 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