Icon Archivist | Torchora

🎯 Role Definition

As our Icon Archivist, you are the dedicated guardian of our company's visual language. You’ll be at the heart of our design operations, taking ownership of the entire lifecycle of our digital icons. This isn't just about filing things away; it’s about creating a living, breathing ecosystem of assets that empowers our creative and technical teams. You will build the systems, set the standards, and provide the expert guidance that ensures our brand is represented with consistency and quality across every platform. Your work will directly impact team efficiency, brand integrity, and the overall quality of our user-facing products.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

Digital Asset Coordinator
Librarian / Library Technician
Junior Graphic Designer or Production Artist
Museum Technician

Advancement To:

Senior Digital Asset Manager
Design Operations Manager
Taxonomy or Metadata Manager
Corporate Archivist

Lateral Moves:

Content Strategist
UX Researcher
Information Architect

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

Oversee the entire lifecycle of our digital icon assets, from initial ingestion, rigorous quality control, and metadata application to long-term digital preservation and eventual, strategic decommissioning.
Develop, implement, and meticulously maintain a comprehensive metadata schema and taxonomy specifically tailored for our extensive icon library, ensuring intuitive findability and deep contextual relevance.
Critically evaluate and process all new icon submissions from our design teams, ensuring they meet established quality, format, and branding standards before being published in the central archive.
Act as the primary system administrator and subject matter expert for our Digital Asset Management (DAM) platform, managing user roles, access permissions, and system configurations to balance security and usability.
Establish, document, and enforce clear, logical file-naming conventions and folder structures to create an intuitive and highly scalable organizational system for all visual assets.
Proactively collaborate and build strong relationships with design, product, and engineering teams to deeply understand their workflows and advocate for best practices in asset creation and management.
Serve as the central point of contact for all icon-related inquiries, providing expert guidance and fulfilling complex search requests for teams and stakeholders across the entire organization.
Design and deliver engaging training sessions, workshops, and clear documentation to educate colleagues on how to effectively search for, retrieve, and correctly utilize icons from the DAM system.
Conduct regular, detailed audits of the icon archive to proactively identify and correct metadata inconsistencies, broken links, outdated assets, and potential compliance issues.
Manage and embed digital rights information associated with each icon, working closely with the legal team to ensure all assets are used in full compliance with licensing and usage restrictions.
Curate specialized collections, featured galleries, and "smart albums" within the DAM to highlight high-value icons and support specific marketing campaigns, product launches, or design initiatives.
Research and document the provenance, version history, and design rationale of key icons and visual motifs, providing valuable context for brand storytelling and legacy projects.
Monitor asset usage analytics to generate insightful reports on popular icons, search trends, and user behavior, providing data-driven recommendations to inform future design strategy.
Participate in the selection, implementation, and integration of new archival tools and technologies to continuously innovate and improve the efficiency of our asset management ecosystem.
Develop and maintain a comprehensive disaster recovery and digital preservation plan to safeguard the company’s valuable and irreplaceable visual assets against data loss or corruption.
Facilitate the process of icon version control, clearly documenting changes, updates, and the relationships between different iterations or states of a single asset.
Perform detailed quality assurance checks on all new and revised icons, ensuring technical specifications such as file type, resolution, grid alignment, and color profiles are pixel-perfect.

Secondary Functions

Support product and marketing teams by fulfilling ad-hoc data requests and performing exploratory analysis on icon usage and search trends.
Contribute your specialized knowledge to the organization's broader data governance and information management strategy.
Collaborate with designers and developers to translate visual asset needs into clear technical requirements for our systems and tools.
Champion the value of the icon archive across the company, demonstrating how a well-managed library drives brand consistency, efficiency, and creative excellence.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

Deep expertise in administering enterprise-level Digital Asset Management (DAM) systems (e.g., Bynder, AEM Assets, Canto, Brandfolder).
Strong command of metadata principles and standards, including IPTC and Dublin Core, with proven experience building custom schemas and taxonomies from the ground up.
High proficiency with modern design software and workflows (especially Figma, Sketch, and Adobe Creative Suite) to understand asset creation, specifications, and handoffs.
A comprehensive understanding of various digital file formats, particularly vector (SVG) and raster (PNG) formats, and their specific use cases, advantages, and limitations.
Familiarity with the fundamentals of database concepts and the ability to perform basic data queries (SQL) for custom analysis and reporting.
A solid understanding of information architecture principles to logically structure and organize a large-scale asset library for optimal user experience.

Soft Skills

An almost obsessive attention to detail and a genuine passion for bringing order, logic, and clarity to complex digital environments.
Exceptional communication and interpersonal skills, with the ability to translate technical archival concepts for non-technical stakeholders and build consensus.
Proactive and creative problem-solving abilities, capable of identifying potential issues in workflows or systems and recommending practical, effective solutions.
Superior organizational and time-management skills, with a proven ability to juggle multiple priorities, projects, and stakeholder requests simultaneously without sacrificing quality.
A collaborative, service-oriented mindset that is laser-focused on enabling other teams to do their best work more efficiently.
Strong analytical and research skills, with the intellectual curiosity to dig deep into asset history, usage data, and user needs.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

Bachelor's Degree in a relevant field.

Preferred Education:

Master's Degree in Library and Information Science (MLIS), Archival Studies, Museum Studies, or Digital Asset Management.

Relevant Fields of Study:

Information Science / Information Management
Art History / Visual Culture
Graphic Design
Computer Science

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range:

3-5 years of hands-on experience in digital asset management, archival science, or a closely related information management role.

Preferred:

Direct experience managing a digital asset library within a fast-paced technology company, design agency, or corporate marketing department.
Proven track record of successfully implementing or significantly improving a DAM system or a similar large-scale information repository.