Overview - Getting Started On Your Design Resume

Your resume, (also known as a curriculum vitae or CV outside of the U.S.), is the main way of catching the attention of a recruiter or hiring manager. It is the vehicle that you use to tell your story and to outline your strengths that enable you to contribute to the success of the company. A resume highlights your skills, achievements and experience. Think of it as your proxy, as well as a critical component in crafting your personal brand. What do you want this document to say about you when you can’t be there to say it yourself?

By keeping your resume concise, it gives a preview of what you can do without giving your full story away. You want to highlight just enough to entice your potential employer to call you for more information.

Your resume will explain in a direct but visually interesting way how you got to where you are today. You'll want to make your resume visually interesting because It has to make people want to read it—and it is a reflection of your skills as well as your personal branding. A well-designed resume must look nothing like the Word document we’ve all created in the past.

Resumes need to convey:

1. What you’ve accomplished in your career by means of where you’ve worked
2. What you bring to the table to a potential employer
3. A little about yourself by means of your personal branding
4. How best to contact you

When we talk about creating a resume, we really mean two important and equal halves:

1. Writing your resume
2. Designing your resume

Doing one well doesn’t guarantee doing the other one well; they require both sides of the skills 
you’ve practiced thus far.

Creating your resume is like putting together a puzzle you don’t have a picture of. You’ll write text that’s a certain length, and have a certain number of sections. Then when you design everything out, you’ll choose a typeface, weight, and size that impacts overall layout elements like column widths and header size. Then, you’ll make a layout change to one section, and that requires changes to other sections—making them wider or taller, and likely requiring you to go back and add or delete text again.

You’ll likely go through multiple rounds to decide how to lay everything out the best way. That helps you understand the hierarchy of your information, how you can incorporate personal branding, and what information is truly important for you.

Here is a Design Resume Checklist that provides a summary of the information most important to include in your resume.