Mon, 22 Feb 2010 10:03:16 +0000

10 Useful Tips For A Great Résumé Design

Let’s now take a look at some useful ideas and guidelines that – in our humble opinion – may help you to achieve a great, compact and beautiful CV.

1. Make It a Summary

Your résumé needs to tell an employer (at a quick glance) the details most relevant to him or her. This means the whole thing should fit on one page! If you’re a Web designer, keeping it short and punchy is even more important. Sure, writing for Web is different than writing for print, but by showing your potential employer that you can keep things concise, you are actually showcasing an important Web skill. Besides, you need to leave something to talk about in the interview!

2. Keep It Simple and Understandable

When designing a CV, remember first and foremost that you are a designer, but don’t go overboard. Many people over-design their résumé. It’s a chronic problem: they’ll add so many fancy bits that the actual content gets lost. Most design jobs are all about your ability to organize content, so simplify, simplify, simplify!

But that doesn’t mean boring either. “Simple doesn’t mean simplistic; simple is hard to achieve,” says Niamh. Remember that you are applying for a design job, not to become a managerial assistant or to compete in an art college creativity competition.

3. Leave Some Details Out

Some people include their entire life history and every personal detail on their résumé. Your job as a clerk at the corner store 10 years ago won’t ever get you a job in Web design. Mentioning it only takes focus away from your relevant work experience. Keep your marital status, age and grades off, too. What if a potential employer wants to see your grades? Wez Maynard offers some great advice about this: “If the employer wants to judge you on your grades and not your portfolio, believe me, you do not want to work for them.”

4. Make It Perfect

You are a professional, so attention to detail is critical. Everything on your CV should line up, every pixel should be absolutely perfect. And even though the job is not to be a writer, a large proportion of employers throw away résumés with spelling or grammatical mistakes in them. By making it perfect, you are showing potential employers that you aren’t sloppy and that you will care about every detail of their projects. Get 10 people who can spell to look it over. Just do it.

5. Use a Grid

Over and over, Web designers scream about “the grid.” Why is the grid so important for a Web designer’s résumé? If you’re applying for a design job, the employer will most likely have an understanding of grids and baseline grids. “If you’re not using a grid, you run the risk of giving the impression that you don’t have an understanding of basic design principles,” Olliekav warns us. For those employers with no design background, grids make your résumé look cleaner and more organized.

6. Make It Printable

When working on designs for websites, you are allowed to have dark, moody and texture-heavy backgrounds. They look fantastic on your browser, but they are simply inappropriate for résumés. Most CVs are printed out and given to hiring managers in batches, but not everyone has a photo-quality color printer; and, without contrast, your background-heavy résumé will become illegible.

So make sure your résumé

1. matches the paper size for your country (letter size for the US and A4 for the UK, for example), so that employers don’t have to make any adjustments before printing,
2. has a white background,
3. looks okay in black and white,
4. will print well at 300 dpi. The best way to avoid a pixelated result is to create a PDF with embedded fonts.

7. Link to Your Online Projects

Displaying URLs for your projects is crucial. If the employer will be viewing the résumé as a PDF, link the URLs back to your portfolio (using anchors if it is very long) or the projects themselves. Here’s how to create links in a PDF document.

(Many of the designers in the Steve Stevenson challenge noted that they would have done this, but because the applicant is fictional, the links wouldn’t have gone anywhere!)

Once your résumé is printed out, it should serve as a quick reference for potential employers to check out your projects. So, spell out the URLs alongside your project descriptions. You don’t need the http://www at the beginning of each URL, though.

8. Don’t Use a Template

A little inspiration here and there never hurt anyone. But imagine you submitted a résumé and it was the exact same as someone else’s? Gosh, would your face be red. If you are a Web designer, you probably wouldn’t want to use a template for your portfolio website either. Take some time and think about the impression you want to make: I bet it isn’t that you can enter data into a template.

9. Update it often

Résumés are an often neglected aspect of a web designer’s portfolio. Make sure you update it every time you update your portfolio and make it accessible from your portfolio.

10. Show Your Personality

You are a designer, so I hope you have your own style. Steve Stevenson, from his interests, sounds like an interesting guy. Olliekav used his love of Japanese culture to give his résumé a personal touch without going overboard. If the job you’re applying for requires a lot of creative thinking, the employer wants to know you’re not a pixel pusher or a drone. Let them know you have personality, a sense of humor and a sense of style.

Bonus: If You’re Going to Break the Rules, Do It Well

Albert’s resume is completely unprintable, but it’s also absolutely beautiful. If you’re going to take risks like this, make sure you’re willing to alienate a few haters en route to more creative employers who will appreciate your ability to think outside of the box. Always make sure you’re aware of the rules, and break them cautiously. Done right, you’ll shine from the crowd.

The résumé is an oft-neglected piece of the Web designer’s portfolio. Make sure you update yours every time you update your portfolio, and make it accessible from your portfolio.

About the Author

Kat Neville is a Canadian Web designer with a degree in marketing who works in London, UK. She also loves arts and crafts and has recently taken up plastic-toy making and dressmaking. You can find her design work (and her plastic goat) at safetygoat.co.uk.

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Graphic Designer urgently required

Our client, a reputable medium sized organization is looking for a graphic designer with a certificate/diploma in Graphic Design.

Responsible for professional and efficient execution of the company's graphic and creative designs, the successful candidate will be expected to meet the following profile.

Has certificate in graphic design training
Computer literate
Able to use web-based resources
Good command of both spoken and written English
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Closing Date: Tuesday 24th February 2010