Showcase Design Skills in Your Resume
By: Gabriella Fredericks
Tags: Design Process, Resume, Resume Writing Tips, Resume Design, Resume Writing

Creating and updating your resume can be a daunting task, especially for creatives where the layout and design of your resume is just as important as the written information. As someone who uses my resume to showcase both my formal experiences and my design skills, I’ve learned a lot over the past years about resume design. Here, I’ll break down my revision journey and share some of the resume design tips I learned through the process.

My Design Process

As an English major with a Graphic Communication minor, I’ve learned to balance the importance of text and graphics for my entire college career. The tips below come from the general design principles I’ve learned throughout my time in the Graphic Communication and English Departments.

Before taking design classes, my resume was boring, to say the least. I was totally focused on text, using complete sentences and writing a lot for each position’s description. Seeing the uneven top and bottom line strokes now makes me cringe. This version of my resume is clean, but it lacks the important balance between writing and design. I will say, it does have a good font hierarchy and specific titles for each section, which helps keep the information organized.

I improved it slightly after I took classes where I was taught the Adobe Creative Suite. InDesign has become the program I now use to layout my resume. The following resume version has even lines that cross in the corner and boxes with rounded corners for my skills and programs lists. This version definitely has a better balance between the text and design elements. It still has some problems though; my name is not big enough to grab people’s attention, and I am still using complete sentences in my descriptions. I also closed off some important white space where eyes could rest by adding those crossing lines.

After hearing a lecture on resume design and looking at my peers’ resumes, I realized that I needed to completely revamp the document. I changed the accent color, made my name much bigger, and turned my descriptions into bullet points beginning with active verbs. I also added the LinkedIn logo to link to my profile and put the month next to my graduation year.

Choosing this shade of green was a big thing for me. I thought about what emotions I wanted to give people when they saw the document and what color I wanted to represent me. I choose green because of its symbolism for growth and harmony. The shade I picked is the color that my childhood bedroom was painted, so this color also has a deeper meaning to who I am as a person. This color has helped me brand myself and is now the main or accent color of all my profiles.

After completely redesigning my resume, I solicited feedback from as many people as possible. I found the most helpful advice came from doing a drop-in resume clinic with my university’s career services. I highly recommend you reach out to others and don’t be afraid of constructive criticism!

Here are some key takeaways I learned from this process of designing and redesigning:

Use White Space

Give your eyes and your viewer’s eyes a rest! It’s helpful to have decent margins and consistent spacing to break up all the text with white space. Generally, you want to have a half inch to one inch margins and keep the resume to a page long.

Have Font Hierarchy

Use consistent bolding, underlining, italicizing, and sizing for position titles, headers, dates, description, etc. Your name should stand out the most, followed by your positions, then dates or descriptions. The font you choose should be clean and professional like Helvetica, Arial, or Times New Roman. Try to use the same font for the whole resume and use different styling, like sizing, bolding, or underlining, to differentiate between sections. I recommend sizing the body 10–12 points, headings 11–14 points, and your name 18–24 points.

Add Some Color

The color you choose and how you incorporate it should work to further brand yourself. Think about the emotions associated with different colors: what feeling do you want people to have when they look at your resume? To be extra fancy, consider using the same accent color in your resume, portfolio, LinkedIn, and cover letter. This strongly establishes your personal brand and makes you more memorable.

Include Links

Include links to your portfolio and LinkedIn in your resume! LinkedIn has high quality logo downloads that you can use to easily link to your profile. This is the site where you can download them: https://brand.linkedin.com/downloads. Remember to have consistent personal branding across your links. Use the same font, accent color, images, etc. across your links to strengthen your personal brand.

Proofread!

My last advice comes from my experience being an English major. This isn’t necessarily a design concept, but it is so important. A spelling or grammar error is something that can so easily be fixed, but can often slip by and severely hurt your chances of being hired. Check your spelling and grammar, especially your dashes. Your date ranges should look like “Jan – Oct” with an en dash being used. On a Mac, pressing the Option (Alt) key and the hyphen (-) creates an en dash (–). On Windows, hold down the Alt key and type 0150. The en dash appears when you release the Alt key. Remember to check the rest of your grammar, too! But for resumes, don’t use complete sentences. Begin descriptions with action verbs to make your accomplishments in each position stand out.

Hopefully, this article gets you thinking about the design principles you can apply to your own resume. Think about adding more white space, having a hierarchy of font styles, using color, including links, and meticulously proofreading! Being more aware of the decisions you make throughout the design process will help you land the stepping-stone internship or dream job you’ve been wanting! What principles do you think are the most valuable to you? Use your answer to help you get started. Happy revising!