The first item that will reflect your “personal brand” and carry the very important job of conveying who you are, as a professional for hire, is your resume.
Depending on who you ask, the structure can vary. However, in our industry there are a few sections that seem to always be needed: your full name, contact info, and portfolio url. You do not necessarily need your full address, but it is wise to include city and state. It’s up to you as to how much contact info you wish to share. As a point of strategy, if the position is out of town, it might be good to exclude your address. Let the potential hire get to like you and your work first. Or, the opposite might be true: lead with the fact you are out of town from the company but with openness to remote work and/or the desire to relocate, this might be a point of conversation you’d like to address early. Again, this is 100% up to you. Another point of strategy we’ve learned depending on size of company or agency: since we don’t always know what key words HR teams are using to sort out a candidate, it doesn’t hurt to submit a version with your full contact and one without.
Our copy writer friends might advise: “You need a logline.” What they mean by that is a one sentence summary, an overview statement about you and your ethos as a graphic designer at the beginning of the resume. This gives the interviewer a sense of your tone, philosophy, perspective and writing style. It could be as simple as: Hello. My name is Jane Smith and I am a graphic designer who focuses on storytelling and brand strategy. You can get deeper into what you are looking for, and why you feel you’d be a good fit in your cover letter. Side note: design your cover letter in line with your resume look, feel and structure, as if they are both done on your personal brand’s letterhead. This shows consistency, structure, and understanding of design format cohesion.
After your name, contact info, and overview statement: you’ll want to get right into your experience in reverse chronological order. Meaning, your latest role is at the top, and the previous roles you’ve had follow in descending order. For each role, it is beneficial to state: the company name, the city it is in, your role, and the timeframe you had in that role. An address or contact info for that company isn’t needed here as you are promoting your contributions and responsibilities, not the company itself. If you’d like, use the company’s url — this is up to you.
Next will be your education. Some folks like putting this before their experience and both are acceptable. This would be the college you went to, the city the college is in, the year you graduated, and the degree you received. If you have multiple schools and degrees, list them in reverse chronological order. If you didn’t go to college, that is fine as well — you’ve come this far, and you must be driven.
Following education is your “hard” skills. This is a list of the technical abilities you have, the software you are versed in, and any other tangible skills that clearly define what you are capable of doing in the role. Examples of hard skills are: Adobe Creative Suite, Photo Retouching, Programming Languages, Video Editing Software, etc. Then comes your “soft skills”. These are approaches to problem solving, how you think, and any other talents that benefit the role you are seeking based on experiences you have gained earlier. These could be: Creative Strategy, Team/Project Management, File Organization, People Person, Comfortable in front of Clients, Public Speaking, etc. Soft skills balance hard skills and let the interviewer gain insight into the professional you, personality, and of course your graphic design chops.
Lastly, extra curricular activities is always a little tricky to list, but should be considered. Especially if they relate to your profession and industry. Examples of such relevant experience are volunteering your services for non-for-profits, or contributing articles to organizations (like this one), or speaking engagements, etc. Presenting this list can show that you are involved beyond the 9-5 of your profession. Activities that may not be relevant or impress in regards to your desired position should be avoided. These no-no topics might be: mountain biking, playing chess, bowling, going out every weekend to the club, long walks on the beach… I think you get the idea; it’s not a dating service questionnaire.
Once you have your content organized, you can begin to think about layout of this info and its aesthetic. Make your guidelines and columns, set up your font styles and colors. There are no hard rules as to which program you should use to design your resume, but we’d assume it’d be a product that represents the tools of your trade. We suggest in no particular order: InDesign, Affinity Publisher and/or Pages. We do not recommend Photoshop or Keynote, although those are feasible, they are generally used for other specific tasks such as image manipulation and/or presentations. Now that the content and layout is in progress, look at other peoples’ resume examples for layout inspiration and ideas. Especially other graphic designers.
Remember, expression is important, but not as important as the information you are trying to convey. Let the type choices, colors palette, and look of your columns and margin structures be the personality. There is a lot you can do with just typeface weights to achieve a distinct style, but try not to go overboard. Too many fonts might cause your resume to be distracting from its purpose and hard to read. The same core tenants and principles of good design apply here and should be utilized in order to layout a resume that is easy to understand and digest in a short amount of time. We recommend your resume not be more than 2 pages plus a cover sheet. A one page resume is ideal, but understandably, harder to achieve if you are a more experienced person with many years in the biz.
Lastly, depending on who you ask, there are many opinions and views on business cards. Are they relevant? Should you use a V card (aka digital business card), or both? It is entirely up to you. We are of the mindset that people like to receive tactile things and if you get an opportunity to meet with, network with, or be interviewed by some one; it might be nice to actually have a physical paper business card as a leave behind. It also doesn’t hurt to have a clean and crisp printed copy of your resume with you for those instances when asked for one. It shows you think ahead and come prepared to make an impression, and have considered how your information might change hands, and (literally) that you are leaving your mark. It also doesn’t hurt to have a QR code to your portfolio and/or a link to an online V card or your LinkedIn page available, either printed or digital. Remember, job interviews are opportunities to market yourself, in addition to seeing if you’d be a good fit for the role and vice versa — so be ready to promote yourself in a professional way. All eyes are on you from the moment you make contact. Show them why they have to have you.
You bring what no one else can: you bring you.
SINCERELY,
Sean Fermoyle
Graphic Designer/Art Director
SEANFERMOYLE.COM
Robert Robbins
Creative Director
ROBERTWROBBINS.COM
