over 8 years ago from Jonathan Shariat, Designer @ Google | Author @ O'Reilly | Podcaster @ DesignReview
I have only interviewed a handful of designers in my work so far, and seen the résumé's of my friends but I always wonder what the rest of the industry's looks like.
Please share what your résumé looks like.
Résumés are so much fun to design! I'm not a big fan of the untraditional super-graphic ones, but I really enjoy the process of setting type nicely and adding some extra ornamentation.
I haven't updated mine since I graduated, so it feels a little outdated (especially the "taught by" section), but here it is. http://christinerode.com/resume.pdf
I had a rubber stamp made, so in the physical version the corner postal mark is actually stamped on.
I love how organized this is.
Beautiful.
Okay I'm just going to come out and say it. Why are all the best designers from Europe? You guys are light years ahead of us in terms of typography, use of negative space, and cleanliness. I should have studied abroad. Your resume is inspirational.
Hah! I learned everything I know at art school in California, so I'm not sure your point stands. :)
No, it must be in your genes. In my design classes practically all the works we studied were Scandinavian.
This is some real quality work. I love the typography! I think your link is broken though. I can't seem to view the PDF.
Oh dammit this is WAY too gorgeous. Now I feel bad about mine.
(Slash will spend my weekend redesigning it.)
I love your resume!
Here's mine! I decided to screw the bullet point style paradigm and try a more storytelling approach with short paragraphs: http://bysusanlin.com/SusanLin-resume.pdf
I also didn't include my full history, but edited it to the audience. (What would someone looking to connect w/ me as a designer want to know the most? Maybe not very relevant to include my very first internship doing production marketing prints)
Glimpse of the first iteration https://dribbble.com/shots/810401-r-sum-refresh
Love this approach. Tailored & personable & perfectly balanced.
Thanks Jessica, :)
Oh, I love this! The three icons are really delightful, and I love the way you organized it. It works really well with the top three items on top, and grouping all past work together at the bottom. It's a clean, readable resume, while still injecting bits of personality. Great job!
Thanks Christine!
JUST when I was about to start structuring my resume, for a job change.
DN IS MY BESTFRIENDFOREVERS!!!!!!
Wow, I really like this! Such a cool idea to have different experiences depending on who is viewing.
Very cool approach but it breaks the UX principle of content parity. Why do some types of people get to see your work history and others don't?
For example, I really like your idea of doing a quick pitch for entrepreneurs. But they should definitely be able to "turn over the napkin" so to speak to get all the same information about you that someone might want you to know.
Basically I would have approached this as a question of how do I best present my information to different audiences? Not, what information should I share with each audience?
Awesome!
Cool idea man!
Here is mine: http://james.lacroix.io/
Very nice!
What font is Titles?
Really nice resume. Elegant and to the point.
I noticed you're in the Starter League in Chicago. I live there now and have heard about it. How do you like it? Anything you can fill me in on or any tips on how to go about joining up?
Thanks Joseph, I didn't attend Starter League so I can't provide too much insight into the classroom experience. I only served as a mentor for some of the students attending and it seems to be a fantastic program with some great people behind it. It is really exciting to see what it has done for the community here and the ventures that have come out of it. Occasionally, they will host events at 1871 that are open to the community. I would recommend attending one of those if you get the opportunity.
Thanks Jonathan!
All of the sans-serif fonts are variations of Gotham and the body text is all set in Mercury. For the titles on the left (desktop), I am using Gotham Condensed.
Beautiful! I've never seen a web page dedicated to a resume before. I love the typography. And it's responsive too! Lovely :)
You spelled "involvement" wrong. Yours says "Involevment"
Thanks for catching that Garrett!
Out of interest, those who are in hiring positions and review lots of CV's - what are you looking for the most in a CV?
There's a lot of different approaches just in this short topic and some I'd have have said were a lot better than other in conveying core skill and experience while others look like a lot of filler hidden behind design flourish.
What's the best balance for someone looking to hire?
(I'm the art director for a clothing company and do a fair amount of creative hiring. Designers, photographers, videographers, stylists, etc. All of this applies to résumés as well.)
The most important thing your CV can do is tell me where I can find samples of your work. Everything else—literally EVERYTHING—is secondary. I don't even care what the first letter of your first name is until I've seen your work.
If I've decided I like your work, the next most important thing is your dimension as a human. If you have anything interesting to say about other expertise or passions you have, share it. This is kind of a slippery slope, though—if you're applying for a UI position, but you also spend a bunch of time writing X-Files fanfiction, definitely let me know. But if you spend three lines telling me that you were a prep cook in high school, I'm just going to think you're insecure about the work you've done and are trying to fill space.
Beyond that, I just want the basics. Where you've worked, where you went to college (if you did at all—I don't care if you didn't, and actually prefer to hire creatives who studied outside their discipline), and any shows or publications you have under your belt. When possible, telling me exactly where I can find examples of the work you did at/for any of this stuff is great, too.
Turn-ons:
Very clear, very simple, very readable typography. Flashy CVs are bad. Very, very bad. I'm not saying don't try something new—please do, I'm looking at hundreds of these—but this is a document of textual information, not your portfolio.
Humor. My eyes are burning and I want nothing more than to stop browsing CVs and get back to the parts of my job that don't make me want to autodefenestrate. Smart, tasteful humor will make me think interviewing you might be more fun than interviewing the next guy or girl.
Good writing. If I'm not hiring you to write, I don't need you to be a great writer, but if I'm going to be communicating with you, I need you to be able string a sentence together, or compose a parallel list. Probably 7/10 CVs I review have at least one typo, misspelling, or major grammatical error in them. That shit is fucking inexcusable and will make me want to print out your CV just so I can light it on fire and douse the flames with my urine. If you struggle with English because it isn't your first language, that is totally okay, but your CV is still a professional product and needs to meet certain standards. You can either get help with your writing or just straight-up tell me with an asterisked note or in your cover letter. I'm not going make assumptions about your relationship with language. That would be a dick thing to do.
Turn-offs:
Anything about your process. This is valuable in a portfolio, but if I want to know your modus operandi, I'm going to call you in to talk about it in person.
Anything about why you do what you do. I can and will ask you that in your interview, and there's no way to explain to me in writing why you are passionate about graphic design without sounding like a complete douche.
Humor. If you aren't absolutely certain what you're doing is funny, DO NOT RISK IT. I would rather get a text message from a stranger saying that he just ran over my mom and has kept driving and will never be caught and hahahaha than read your stupid joke. Do you have any idea how embarrassing that is for me, reading your joke? It's like being caught masturbating by my mom who was just run over.
Any unnecessary elements. Flashy graphics, background textures, a stupid photo of your ugly face, a million colors—all clutter that just gets in the way of your CV doing what it's supposed to do: tell me what you've done. Even if all these things make your CV look beautiful, they are not necessary, and will probably just annoy me. Granted, this has a lot to do with my design philosophy in general (the ol' less is more), but I think most hirers would agree that the words are the most important things on your CV.
I could think of a million more turn-offs, I'm sure, but it's Friday and I want to go home.
Good luck!
Thanks Will, that's some great advice / direction there
Good points!
Only thing I can comment is that a photo is (sometimes) good if it's well done, only because it adds a bit of humanity to it.
Love this! Do you have a pdf version?
No but you can print it to PDF using chrome.
nice one. PDF?
This is the template I use for mine http://uxmovement.com/products/light-resume-easy-on-the-eyes-and-your-printer/
Curious as to why you've chosen to go with a template for something that is so personally connected to your own experiences?
I don't think it's bad, just wondering.
The purpose of a resume is to get the interview, not to show off your personality on a piece of paper. Save your personality for the interview.
All your resume needs is to be clear, structured and easy to scan. This template does that well and is easy to customize.
Nothing wrong with using templates. Most templates just suck.
All your resume needs is to be clear, structured and easy to scan.
I agree with this. I didn't take a look at the template you referenced, but a resume does seem to be something utilitarian—more a tool than a display of skill.
If you were applying for a position that was more 'graphic design' and traditional type-setting, I'd imagine a template wouldn't do the job however.
You should look at it first before you make that comment.
I actually am not a fan of this resume template.
You mentioned the resume needing to be clear. However, little bar charts with no actual point of reference as to what they are measured against are absolutely useless and not clear.
You may not like it, but I think it's the clearest, simplest and most effective resume template out there for communicating your information to a hiring manager fast.
The bars are quite useful and clear to anyone who understands what they're used for. It's important for hiring managers to know where you feel your strengths are. The bars give them a quick overview of what you're great, good and average at.
I looked at your resume and it lacks two of the most important things every resume should have, a description of what you did at each company and a self-summary. WIthout that you don't stand apart. Anyway, I don't want to argue, but after looking at your resume I don't think you have much room to talk.
My résumé includes a summary of my educational background, professional experience, and any relevant skills and accomplishments. It's tailored to the position I'm applying for and highlights my relevant experience. It also includes any awards or certifications I've earned, as well as volunteer work or internships. My résumé is concise, well-organized, and easy to read. Top resume writers provide expert advice and guidance to create a resume that stands out from the competition.
Five days late to the game on this one. Oh well.
As someone who is and has been a Creative Director in varying industries (Design, Advertising, Marketing, Tech) and has hired a good number of designers, here's my advice:
Make sure your name is included in the filename. Seriously. This is huge. Don't send me a file named "cv.pdf" or "resume.pdf". I just got forty of those in the past hour. Send me a file that's called "chrisgovias-cv.pdf" because then you'll instantly stand out. Because I'll know who you are.
Show me the work. Don't mess around. Just give me a link or a way to see your work as quickly as possible.
Which leads nicely into:
Keep it simple. I don't want decorations, illustrations, doodles, timelines or any of that stuff. Give it to me straight and simple because really, I'm going to judge you on your portfolio.
Don't use icons or pictographs as illustrations or decorations. They're meant for signage or for situations where words are insufficient/inappropriate. If you use them just to add some visual flair to your résumé or CV, I'm going to assume you're lazy.
It's not ok for your résumé to be an image file. A web-compressed JPG? A lossless PNG? Either way, I'm going to assume you don't know what you're doing
Mine is fairly straightforward
(Hooray Meta Serif!)
I am very jealous of your involvement with Treme. How'd you get that job?
Before I started doing real UI and web things, I did fictional UI for props (but also print graphics, etc.). Plus I'm friends with a lot of the crew, a lot of familiar faces from other David Simon projects. Did you watch the show?
Love it.
Thanks!
i haven't updated it recently, but here goes: http://goo.gl/MDyU9F
Mine is a bit old. But I'm all for simplicity and good typesetting. I don't think a resume is meant to wow readers, it's meant to show experience and skill. Restraint goes a long way in my opinion.
However, I threw a giant logo on mine. The new version won't have that.
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/51878909/Benjaminkowalski_Resume.pdf
Here's mine! I had to throw something together in an evening when contacted by a potential new employer, but I'm fairly happy with the result. I get positive feedback when people view my resume. I've tried to keep it fairly informational, yet give it a personal touch.
Although I've seen plenty of better ones on this page haha!
This is the CV I made for my Google interviews last year http://sherpanaut.com/files/cv-oisin-lavery.pdf
My is here : http://maximerenaudin.fr/resume.pdf
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My 2 cents: nice start, good content but the hierarchy and grid are lacking.
For example, the icons vary a lot in visual weight, and overpower the associated thin text anyway.
The position of the section headers changes through the document : "Experience" is far from "UX Designer", but "Interests" almost touches the text below.
Text changes in typeface, size, weight, color, alignment, etc. making it look a bit cluttered. It could probably be streamlined.
Etc. Again, that's quite subjective.
hey maxime, my first impression is that it's visually busy and stuffed. I think it would benefit from a bunch more whitespace and, as was mentioned, better info hierarchy.
Breaks between different content chunks (like different jobs, different schools) are not clear. whitespace it up!
As a shoot-from-the-hip answer, I'd say remove the icons in the top section (they're redundant), and describe the work/projects with prose. the skills section could take up 1/4th the space.
something that I don't like personally but might be subjective is that the two columns make it difficult to skim, which most people will do. most resumes have a single column, or at least a primary column, of content. I would try to put all of the main information into a single column, w 2ndary info on the sides.
my 2 cents.
Added it to my website to show it here:
My personal site is my résumé. Built it in a few hours on a slow sunday: http://yoshuawuyts.com
Feedback welcome!
You should check this with what others are saying, but I think you've put too much info on one page, and it would be better to split it over two pages
Two pages would be welcome (as said before) You also need more hierarchy in term of visual importance, side projects should not be as big as work experience for example.
Kinda like having H1, H2, H3 and body text but for blocks of contents.
Thanks for the feedback. I just redesigned it and I think it seems cleaner now. What do you think?
Awesome. Thanks.
Any cents on fitting all that on one page? I've asked a lot of recruiters and most recommend keeping resumes to 1 page. But I find it way too hard to mention most of my stuff without the resume looking cluttered.
Go for 7-8pt body text size if you print on A4 sheets.
Scale everything down a bit if needed.
I'll try some smaller font sizes but Isn't that way too small to read?
See the top post on this thread, the text is small on screen but perfectly readable when printed on A4. Just try to print yours before finalizing the design. Too big fonts make it look clunky (could be ok if you do a playful CV, but small fonts looks cleaner and more business oriented usually)
I have a one pager that is a modification of one of the Pages resume templates.
I've had a lot of feedback from interviewers on how refreshing it is to read up something so simple.
Naturally I make sure I have a solid portfolio to back up the basic statements on the resume.
Somewhat unrelated: It was my dream in high school to design the menus in Bungie games. Not sure if you're on the games, but regardless: Cheers, man.
Thanks. It's certainly a dream job for me.
Airy & fresh with that colour! Curious, not knocking your typeface choices: are those Microsoft-safe fonts for easy printing/viewing purposes if someone needs a Word .doc?
Thank you! Fonts are Georgia and Calibri, so it should be okay. I designed the whole thing in Illustrator though, not sure how alignment and spacing would work in a Word .doc.
Here's mine: http://danhough.com/dan-hough-developer-cv-latest.pdf
It's a bit out of date, though. I created it in Illustrator about 8 or 9 months ago. It's probably not the best tool for the job in hindsight but it sure taught me a lot about how to use it.
Hey Dan! I really like yours. Nicely put together! Although I wouldn’t have used justified paragraphs. It leaves several “islands” and “river” in between words, it doesn’t look nice. Plus, a left-aligned paragraph is easier to read.
You're right. I did play around with it a bit when putting it together and my gut told me justified was better but you've highlighted some issues and now I think I prefer left-aligned :) Especially under the "Gojimo" heading, it looks pretty gross:
"Refactoring and extending a large NodeJS"
Thanks for the feedback, Hugo!
This is one of my friend's CV based on a template:
It's nice but why sleeping, that would be off putting as a hiring manager.
Not that you asked for some feedback, but I think it's worth working on your information hierarchy a bit.
I think it's great that you show your love for many things and that you won 25 awards :)
But if I wanted to hire you, In order of priority what are the five things I should know about? And does your layout support to easily scan for those in the right order?
This is what mine looks like.
http://www.nicolarushton.com//wp-content/uploads/Nicola_rushton_resume_Feb2014.pdf
This is my CV: https://d13yacurqjgara.cloudfront.net/users/62128/screenshots/1316790/attachments/187817/CV-EN.pdf
I try to make it Dark & Cool, I want show what my style in this CV.
Don't miss the buttons at the top left -- it does a CSS Zen Garden-style reskinning of the thing on the fly. When I cooked it up seven years ago, I loved the idea of CZG and knew I wasn't talented enough to make a theme of my own that would make the site, but loved the idea of having a playground to try out ideas, so I figured I'd make it happen on my resume as an interesting discussion piece during interviews.
Long story short, it worked. Since then, I've more than doubled my salary navigating the choppy waters of my career.
I'm currently relifting mine Web version = a version with more fun PDF version = the real serious stuff
Comments are welcome, english is not my main language so be gentle :)
Mine is already a bit old, and in comparison to others boring and crammed with info: http://notura.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/Sjors_Timmer_CV.pdf
Ok, you guys have some great résumés, now I'm thinking that I need to up my game.
Mine is very simple and raw, what do you think?
This is mine: http://bobwassermann.me/cv.pdf
Here is mine: http://seegermattijs.be/cv.pdf
Here is my resume:
Just a boring old Google doc in Arial because it DOESN'T MATTER :)
This is my current one. 
One i did few years ago, shows weird colors when converted from PDF.
Still working on it (I wanna add some icons to break up the text), but here it is:
Got mine right here: http://gran.do/cv
(which reminds me, I ought to update it)
Here is mine: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/4804756/Resume/Jonathan_Shariat_UX_UI_Designer.pdf
(Also I'd love any feedback)
If one were to print your resume, how will they know where to access your website, dribbble, etc...
Thanks for the feedback! What do you suggest is a good way to deal with that without cluttering up the top of the page? My assumption with my implementation is that if its in printed form, they cannot get to my links with out getting to computer and typing it in. If they have the digital form its on their computer and they can click. Perhaps I can link to my main site only.
I'd definitely suggest main site only. That's viewed as more serious/professional than anything else and if someone cares to go to your Twitter or Dribbble, they can get there via your site.
I agree with what the other poster said. Place the website url, from there they can usually access the others, and you can also mention the others sometimes in an email when sending your resume. Here's an example where your situation may not work, you send the resume, it goes to HR, HR prints it then hands it off to hiring staff. There's also the unpredictable element where something can go wrong viewing it on their end as well, where maybe the hyperlinks won't work.
Make the margins wider on the left and right, I think you've gone over the 50 character limit in some places ;) http://baymard.com/blog/line-length-readability
Excellent suggestion and link, thank you!
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