Designer LinkedIn Profile Guide & Tips

Although some people dismiss it as “Facebook for professionals,” LinkedIn has, as of 2023, 900 million users worldwide (199 million of them are in the United States) and is used by an estimated 98% of Fortune 500 companies. (LinkedIn also made $14.5 billion for Microsoft in 2022.) That makes it an important resource for those seeking employment, partly because it makes users’ profiles public and available to recruiters and partly because it fosters online professional networks that may or may not have some correlation to knowing people in the real world.

While plenty of people have found jobs without LinkedIn, and plenty of people with profiles on LinkedIn don’t play the LinkedIn game to anything approaching the hilt—nearly 55% of all users have fewer than the 500 connections some sources say you need to have to be doing LinkedIn “right”—LinkedIn is simply too big a stone to leave unturned in your job search.

How to Make a Designer LinkedIn Profile

Many of the ingredients in a LinkedIn profile are the same for everyone and bear a striking resemblance to the list of ingredients in your resume. Indeed, your LinkedIn profile is going to recapitulate everything about your employment history, education, and skill sets that’s in your resume, although it allows you to go into these matters in more depth. There’s nothing holding your LinkedIn profile to one letter-size piece of paper. A LinkedIn profile also allows for various kinds of images, which can make it an extremely useful tool for designers seeking exposure for their work.

Here is a step-by-step guide for designers trying to get started on their LinkedIn profiles.

Your Photo

Remember all those admonitions to the effect that a photo has no place on your resume in most of the English-speaking world? The same ones that said that Hiring Directors routinely discard resumes with photos to avoid all manner of hairy questions regarding discrimination in a company’s hiring practices?

If you don’t remember the warnings, never mind, since they’re about to come to naught. The first thing that goes into (and appears on) a LinkedIn profile is your photograph. Thus all a Hiring Director needs to do to know your race, gender, age, and hair color is bring up your LinkedIn profile. It doesn’t make much sense, but in the immortal words of Winnie-the-Pooh, there it is.

What kind of photo you should have has given rise to all manner of online advice. While common sense dictates you don’t want a picture of yourself with your dog or drinking something out of a flaming pineapple at a luau, the current trend goes to the other extreme and prescribes paying for a professional headshot. You can certainly do that, although job-seekers are inevitably short of funds, and photographers cost money.

Online how-to videos are also available that show you how to take a suitable LinkedIn profile photo by yourself. The good news for Designers is that you probably possess the key skill for transforming an anodyne selfie into something more professionally acceptable: Photoshop. You can use it to pull out the background of your bedroom wall and replace it with a solid background or another layer of your choice.

Remember when attending to this most important of LinkedIn tasks that you’re marketing yourself as a visual artist. Your photo should therefore have some visual zing instead of being a mere shot of you staring into the camera with a mysterious half-smile. You don’t have tons of leeway, but you can do something with your clothes, for example. A picture of you in a gray suit with a gray shirt and a gray tie won’t give the impression that you’re a dynamo of visual innovation. You might even consider a colored background, and if you’re a fashion designer and have some of your own clothes, by all means, use them to establish your personal brand.

Background Banner Image

In addition to the headshot, which appears in a circle at the top of your profile, LinkedIn gives you a chance to put in an oblong image that sits behind your headshot. For designers, this offers up a degree of opportunity since it provides you with the space to create something attractive and unique to show off your brand. The goal should be to showcase what you can do artistically while blending harmoniously with your headshot. You can include some text as part of the image you create, but steer any messages toward the extremely unobjectionable, such as rescuing stray puppies.

Personalized LinkedIn URL

Also, at the top of the page (this time on the right), and the next item on everyone’s LinkedIn checklist, is personalizing the URL for your LinkedIn profile. You’re assigned one when you first sign up, but you can make up your own with a few clicks, and LinkedIn’s algorithm will appreciate your efforts. This is an excellent opportunity to tie your professional email address, LinkedIn URL, and website URL together. You may need to try a few permutations of your name (and perhaps a dot) to get the LinkedIn URL you want, but you should be able to come up with something you like by the third or fourth try.

Headline

Back on the left side of the top of your profile is the all-important headline that gives you the opportunity to knock ‘em dead with 220 characters right out of the gate. It’s the first thing people are going to see after your photos and your name, and it will turn up alongside your name in both LinkedIn and Google search results. If you’ve browsed other people’s LinkedIn profiles, you may have gathered the impression that a headline isn’t such a big deal and that all you need to put is your title and the name of your current employer. 

While that is LinkedIn’s default, and many, many people go with it, the platform gives you space for more than just your title and company. You have room for a message that can promote your personal brand and separate you from the herd of the competition with their boring three- or four-word headlines. You can do a lot in 220 characters. And you should.

If you seek advice from the all-knowing internet as to how to write a LinkedIn headline, you’re going to get scads of advice, a lot of it contradictory. There are even gadgets and gizmos to evaluate and generate headlines for you. When one source tells you to include five keywords in your headline, and another tells you under no circumstances to stuff keywords, you may emerge from your search way more confused than you were when you started.

So where do you even begin? The default of your title and company isn’t the worst place to start, although they don’t absolutely have to be there if you need the characters for something more effective. If your title is something an outsider to your field might not understand, you should also switch it out for something in layperson’s terms. Try to keep your whole headline simple, straightforward, and free of professional jargon. And here’s a rule that will give you a headache: avoid buzzwords but include keywords. 

One thing that your LinkedIn profile shares with the other materials in your job search portmanteau is that it has to impress a chorus of bots and, simultaneously, the humans who you hope are going to look at it. You want search results to push you toward the head of the class (that’s where the keywords come in), and you want to grab the attention of Recruiters and Hiring Directors who turn to LinkedIn to find possible candidates for roles they need to fill.

That’s where the zippy part of your headline comes in. Some experts divide headlines into two separate sections, one with the basic information and keywords and one with the material that is designed to captivate the attention of humans. If you have major achievements to hype, this is the place to do it, and you can include the numbers to prove your claims. If you don’t, you need to come up with language that will set you apart from the pack. You can push the envelope a little here, as the stricter rules for investment bankers don’t apply to creative types like you.

If you don’t have much in the way of past achievements to plug, you can come up with something snappy using present participles to indicate what you can do: “coloring the world outside the lines since 2021,” for example. You can showcase more than one thing, but be sure to use visual separators such as the vertical line (|) to keep the headline legible. Some sources say you can use emojis in your headline; you’re perhaps better off, however, omitting them and keeping the headline uncluttered, elegant, and appealing – you’re a visual artist, remember, and you’re going to be judged by the look of whatever it is you do to present yourself to prospective employers.

There is another tack you can take with your LinkedIn headline, and that’s to go off the wall and somewhat for broke. You can certainly grab someone’s attention that way, get a laugh, and, so the strategy goes, impress your readers with your affability and sense of humor: “coordinating the uncoordinated and reducing fashion police citations by 35% YOY”, for example.

A little-known adjunct to your headline is the possibility of placing a live link just two lines below it. You can use the link to take someone viewing your profile anywhere you want to take them, but the folks at LinkedIn made it tricky to get this highly valuable feature set up. The secret to revealing this Easter egg (in video game parlance) is to scroll down to the Resources section of your profile and turn on what they call Creator Mode. (Creator Mode is something that you should investigate anyway, given that you’re a creative professional and you can do with all the opportunities you can find to showcase your creativity.)

Once you’ve got Creator Mode switched on, you can go back to editing your header, and, as if by magic, when you scroll all the way down to the bottom of the Edit Intro box, there’ll now be a field for a website, followed by a field in which you can put the clickable text you want to appear beneath your headline.

Don’t automatically make the link to your website’s home page. You want, instead, to send viewers to a landing page that will give them helpful information about what you can do without making them search for it. This can be a project of which you’re particularly proud, or consider doing what many businesses do and construct a dedicated landing page that illustrates everything your headline promises. Give the matter some thought: so strategically placed a link is not an opportunity you want to miss out on using. And, while you’re giving the matter thought, try to come up with something cleverer than just “website” as your clickable text.

Post Judiciously to Hook Your Audience

LinkedIn makes it possible to add posts to your profile, just like that other more famous social media platform. Because you have visual wares you can put on exhibit, this posting capability can be a highly effective means of putting your work where people can see it. This in no way means that LinkedIn can replace your portfolio, but it does mean you can offer anyone looking at your profile a sampler of your actual work.

One strategy for doing this is by posting a piece of a project and appending a link to the rest of it on your portfolio or website. Although LinkedIn doesn’t always make external links easy, appending one to a photo post is comparatively simple. All you need to do is paste or type the URL to which you want to link into the “What do you want to talk about?” box, and when you’ve posted it, the URL will show up as a clickable link. Do be sure that you link exactly to the page you want the person looking at your profile to see and not to your home page.

5 Designer LinkedIn Tips

Include Your Contact Information in Your About Section 

For reasons known only to LinkedIn’s creators, the most important information in your profile—how to reach you—doesn’t appear in flashing lights at the top of the page the way it should (and the way it does on your resume and cover letter.) The simplest way to put your contact details at your viewers’ disposal is to stick them in at the top of your About section. You needn’t put everything (and you should refrain from divulging your home address), but you should definitely have your email, phone number, and, since you’re a designer, the URL for your portfolio right where someone interested in you can find them.

While on the subject of the top of your About section, one of the better things about LinkedIn is that you get 2600 characters to fill it out. Although you have plenty of room to go on and on about yourself, you should make sure that the section begins with a pithy three-line summary-of-a-summary that will grab the reader’s attention since, despite the fact that you have all that room, the odds of someone clicking on “see more” to read the whole thing are slim. So make the first few visible lines count.

If You’re Going to Post, Do It Regularly

Posting to LinkedIn is a way to exhibit your bona fides and some of your work. While many users don’t bother with this feature, it can be helpful for creative people who have the fruits of their talents to showcase. The rule here is that if you’re going to do it, you should do it regularly, as in twice a week. So pick two days a week and make a sticky note to remind yourself. As for what to post, make sure it’s all relevant to your career, current, and engaging. And be aware that video content is rapidly growing in popularity, as opposed to just a bunch of words on a screen.

Regular social media marketing principles apply to your LinkedIn posts. LinkedIn itself urges upon its users the so-called 4-1-1 Rule. That rule states that you should go to the hospital when your contractions are four minutes apart, they last for one minute, and the pattern has been present for an hour. Alternatively, the 4-1-1 Rule means that you should make four posts sharing someone else’s content to every one post you make about yourself and round that out with one update from another source. The idea behind the rule is that your posts should not descend into flagrant self-promotion, however much flagrant self-promotion may be your goal.

And do have the common sense to avoid politics and religion in your posts.

Keywords

Although LinkedIn profiles differ from resumes in that they aren’t vetted by heartless applicant tracking systems (ATSs), they are nonetheless searchable and often get searched for prospective candidates for open positions. You thus want to make sure that you turn up towards the top of those search results and, therefore, have to run a mini-SEO (search engine optimization) campaign within your profile. That involves finding the keywords for your particular field and making sure that they appear in your headline and are sprinkled liberally onto your About section.

Of course, you can’t tailor your LinkedIn profile to each person who views it. That makes coming up with keywords a little tricky, although a little common sense should tell you that “graphic design” should probably appear in a graphic designer’s headline and About section. A possible strategy for coming up with key keywords is to go through the ones you’ve isolated based on descriptions of jobs to which you’ve already applied and find the ones that recur there. Another is simply to ask Google what are good keywords for a graphic or fashion, or UI designer’s job search. It’s not the most scientific of approaches, but it should cover at least some of your searchable bases.

Get as Many Contacts as You Can

Although the number may seem astronomical, received wisdom stresses the importance of having 500 contacts on LinkedIn. It goes so far as to say that you’re not using the networking capabilities of the platform properly until you reach that number. Another very good reason for getting to 500 contacts is that that’s the number at which LinkedIn stops telling visitors to your profile how many connections you have. All it says is that you have “500+ contacts.” You may well wonder how you’re supposed to come up with 501 contacts when you haven’t got a tenth of that in your address book, and half of them aren’t on LinkedIn. It takes some perseverance, but it can be done. Just remember not to be shy: the absolute worst someone can say to your connection request is no.

If 500 seems like an impossibly enormous number, you can set your sights on racking up at least 30 contacts. The LinkedIn algorithm works better when you have that number of people in your circle of professional acquaintances. You can also call upon friends and family to connect with you on LinkedIn, especially when you’re starting out and come up short in the professional connections department.

Get Feedback

Because of its importance, you should get a professional opinion or two on your LinkedIn profile. The ins and outs of the platform are complicated, and feedback from someone who understands it can be extremely helpful in crafting something that will attract potential employers. You can always ask someone you trust in your network of connections for constructive criticism. Another would be to consult a mentor, such as you may have encountered during your schooling. Among the schools that offer 1:1 career counseling and mentorship is Noble Desktop, which includes an in-depth review of your job-search materials with all of its certificate programs, which include in-depth career-preparatory courses in Graphic Design, UI Design, and Motion Graphics Design.

Learn the Skills to Become a Designer at Noble Desktop

If you wish to become a designer, Noble Desktop, a tech school based in New York that teaches worldwide thanks to the wonders of the internet, is available to give you the education you need to get started in this exciting field. Noble teaches certificate programs in numerous aspects of design and the technology that makes design possible in the contemporary world. These certificate programs offer comprehensive instruction in their topics and will arm you for the job market in whichever aspect of design interests you.

Noble has certificate programs in graphic design (the Adobe trio of Photoshop, InDesign, and Illustrator), digital design (the main troika of Adobe programs plus Figma for UI design), UX & UI design, and motion graphics. All these programs feature small class sizes in order to make sure that each student receives ample attention from the instructor, and can be taken either in-person in New York or online from anywhere over the 85% of the Earth’s surface that is reached by the internet (plus the International Space Station.) Classes at Noble Desktop include a free retake option, which can be useful as a refresher course or as a means of maximizing what you learn from fast-paced classes. Noble’s instructors are all experts in their fields and often working professionals whose experience is invaluable when they mentor students in the school’s certificate programs 1-to-1.

Noble offers further design courses that are briefer than the certificate programs. You may also wish to consult Noble’s Learning Hub for a wealth of information on how to learn to be a designer.