Designer Resume Guide & Tips

Your resume is an 8½” x 11” piece of paper that summarizes your entire professional life in some 500 words. Also known as a curriculum vitae (CV), which Google translates as “course of life,” it’s the thing you’ve been working on since before you first started working. When you apply for a job (pretty much any job, except for the ones with the annoying applications that make you copy down all the information already on your resume into their blanks), the thing that is going to introduce you to the Hiring Director—and, before that, to the Hiring Director’s army of evil resume-eating bots—is that one sheet of paper or its digital equivalent. Accordingly, it needs to be good enough to get past the bots and hook the Hiring Director. Yes, you’re going to have a portfolio and other supporting materials to go with your job applications, but the first step is always the resume. It’s the pons asinorum of any job application, and it needs to be strong, impactful, and, yes, even truthful.

What to Put on a Designer Resume

Resumes for different professions resemble each other more than they differ. Every resume starts out with contact information and moves on to some permutation of work experience, education, skills, and, space permitting, interests or hobbies. Whether you’re applying to be an accountant, astronaut, or UX designer, your resume is going to contain much the same basic information. Perhaps that explains why there are so many different and eye-catching resume templates from which to choose: Microsoft Word alone offers half a dozen layouts and 57 color schemes from which to choose.

The problem facing any job-seeker today is that resume building has become a pseudoscience. Gone are the days when you updated your resume and used it for every job application you submitted. You’re always the same person with the same course of life and the same professional skills, right? Yes, of course. But, practically speaking, no. Thanks to the advent of the ATS (Applicant Tracking System), you’re going to have to tailor your resume to each new job to which you apply.

As you’re a Designer engaged in a creative profession, there are specific rules that you need to follow to fashion a resume that will end up in human hands. Some of these rules are universal, and they’re all extremely important. This is one of those recipes that come with the warning that you should follow the instructions exactly.

Link to Your Portfolio

The thing that most distinguishes a Designer’s resume from those for other professions is a tiny word or two amidst the all-important contact information. This is where you list your name, mobile phone number, email address, geographical location, and, most importantly, a link to your online portfolio. If you have a website that showcases your designs, you should have a link to that too. (While you’re setting up links, you might as well throw in one to your LinkedIn profile for good measure.)

Once you’ve gotten through the resume-screening process, your portfolio, more than anything else, will decide whether or not you get hired. Of course, that’s only going to happen if you can get the Hiring Director to look at your work, and the first step in that process is having a functioning link to it at the very top of your resume. You should check the link and then double-check it to make sure it works. Dead links are one of the top reasons for which recruiters consign resumes to the circular file.

Keywords are Key

This is where your resume devolves into a strategic game between you and, not so much the Hiring Director (you should be so lucky to be playing The Castles of Burgundy with the human considering you for a job) but with the last-named’s army of evil bots that exist for the sole purpose of jettisoning your resume. If a job has been announced publicly, you can be sure that applicants are going to be pre-screened using an ATS that parses, screens, scores, ranks, scrambles, and discards resumes so as to weed out what it thinks are the least-qualified candidates and make the Hiring Director’s job easier.

If you want to get an even semi-fair shot at any job, you’re going to have to penetrate the ATS’ electronic defenses. Fortunately, that’s not all that impossible to manage. All you need do is prove to the bots that you’re qualified for the role, and the way to do that is to tell them what they want to hear. Once you’ve given up on the idea that one resume will be able to pass muster for any job you’re applying for, your next activity should be to scrutinize the job description for a position’s fundamental qualifications. If the job description calls for Photoshop mastery, 5+ years of experience designing platypus clothes, and being a team player, you better make darn sure that those things are somewhere in your resume.

Yes, this means that your chances as a square-peg candidate for a round-hole job are nonexistent. Hiring Directors aren’t known for their out-of-the-box thinking, and the army of evil bots doesn’t even know that there’s a world beyond their box. Your resume has got to match the keywords in the job description, as there is an enormous likelihood that the bots are set to filter out resumes that don’t contain the requisite keywords and pass along the ones that do.

Alas, job descriptions don’t come with lists of keywords at the bottom. You’re going to have to sift through such information as you have at your disposal in order to come up with the open sesame formula that will charm the bots. That’s not all that difficult, as most job descriptions these days are pretty explicit, and you should be able to make out what the keywords are without too much close textual analysis. 

Your next task is working the keywords into the text on your resume. Don’t think in terms of a keyword-stuffing job like:

Worked with Photoshop for five years of working with Photoshop using Photoshop for Photoshop tasks, including Photoshopping photos for Photoshop purposes.

While that worked in 2010, it’s neither necessary nor encouraged today. Besides, you don’t have that much space to waste on your one sheet of paper. But you should make sure that “Photoshop” turns up in your enumeration of your work achievements, along with “five years’ experience designing for platypodes” (also include “platypuses” just in case) and “team player”.

You may wonder where your many unique qualities go if you’ve got to kowtow to a computer algorithm that is programmed to find the roundest pegs for the hole it has to fill. That’s a very good question, and the basic answer is that, at this stage in the game, you should be more concerned with the keywords than with your uniqueness, mostly because the Hiring Director is going to want to know whether a candidate can do the job as the Hiring Director understands the role and its responsibilities. Hiring Directors aren’t a creative lot as a rule, and when they say they want someone who’s been designing frocks for monotremes for five years, they mean it. And, before anything, you have to get past the wretched bots: if you fail their keyword-generated litmus tests, all your uniqueness will come to naught anyway.

Software is a Key Keyword

Although you’re a creative person applying for a creative role, stuffing the word “creative” into your resume isn’t going to get you far in the resume-screening process. Every designer is creative, and the word has been overused to the point of meaninglessness. That isn’t to say that you shouldn’t include soft skills on a resume, but paradoxically because you’re applying for a creative position, you absolutely should not neglect the hardest skills in your repertoire: your software capabilities. If the job description calls for Adobe programs, list them under your skills section and work them into your previous job descriptions. Remember to weave in the word “Adobe” as well as “Photoshop” to cover your bases.

Make Sure Your Experience is Relevant

Everything on your resume has got to fit onto that one piece of letter-sized paper. The army of evil bots is usually set to chuck two-page resumes, and even if your two-page resume gets past them, the best possible outcome for a human being faced with a two-page resume is that they won’t look at the second page. While the most important part of any resume is the work experience section, by the time you’ve set up your contact information, summary, and skills sections in a format the bots will like, you’re not going to have a whole lot of room on the page. (No, you can’t use an 8-point font and cram the paper full of text. You’re supposed to have plenty of white space on your page as well.) Especially if you’ve had a lot of jobs that have to be listed to avoid exposing the gap in employment so mistrusted by Hiring Directors and their digital minions.

You’re not going to have much room left for the bullet points you put under your various titles and places of employment. As a result, you have to make sure that the achievements you do include in your bullet points are all germane to the role for which you are applying. In other words, you have to overhaul your resume each time you apply for a new job to tell the ATS and the Hiring Director what they want to hear. While where you worked, when you worked there, and what your title was aren’t going to change, be prepared to spend a lot of time reworking your bullet points.

Include a Summary

One of the rubrics encountered on resumes, especially for those fresh out of college, is the objective section. That usually takes the form of a simple sentence or two, or sometimes just something as pared-down and verbless as “career in monotreme couture.” The objective section seems to be going the way of the dodo, however, and probably with good reason, since, bottom line, your objective in applying for any job is to get money so you can continue eating. The objective just takes up space that might be devoted to more useful information, so, unless you’re really just starting out and have absolutely nothing you can put on your resume to fill the page, you’re just as well without it.

On the other hand, what you’re not better off without is a summary section that recaps who you are, whence you’re coming, and what you can do. It’s something that can jump out at the human beings in the estimated six seconds they’ll spend looking at your resume.

A good example of this kind of resume resume might be as follows:

Cutting-edge monotreme fashion designer, expert in Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator, with a love of devising new designs. Demonstrated history of synergetic partnership with clients, brand managers, and executives for timely delivery of ready-to-wear and couture apparel.

Note that the summary omits any use of “I” and doesn’t worry about being written in complete sentences. It should be positioned right underneath your contact information so it’s the second thing the Hiring Director sees.

6 Designer Resume Tips

There’s more to a bot-defeating, HR director-seducing resume than including the above information. There’s enough else to it to have spawned an entire literature. Although not a complete digest of all that material, here are some points well worth considering as you build a resume that is ATS-friendly and locked onto its eventual human target.

Avoid Columns and Fancy Formatting

There is an enormous debate online as to whether you can format your resume in columns. The advantages are obvious: it virtually doubles the space you have to display information about yourself. Paid online resume builders feature all kinds of handsome resume templates using columns of text which they claim will charm the job-specific filters right off the bots.

The problem is that while newer ATSs are, in fact, capable of pulling information from a columnar resume, the older ones can’t and read relentlessly from left to right, with the result that your carefully crafted resume gets turned into gobbledygook. Therefore, while you may be okay with a resume in columns, is that a risk you wish to take? Go for the lowest common bot denominator and keep your resume to one column.

What applies to columns applies to most formatting as well. Those handsome resumes from online resume services look extremely tempting. The difficulty is that the templates are a mishmash of tables and columns, and they run the very real risk of confusing the ATS into which the Hiring Director feeds them. The material in tables may not get read at all; the rest can come out as unintelligible garbage. Worse yet, if and when it comes time for Hiring Directors to afford your resume the statutory six seconds, chances are that what they’ll look at is the version the bots parsed, meaning that they’re not even going to see all your elaborate formatting and spiffy dingbats in place of circular bullets. (If you’re in a situation in which you’re submitting a hard copy of your resume to a hiring director directly, then a fancy version is entirely viable. You ought, therefore, to consider having a fancy version of your resume at the ready along with the one you submit to ATSs via the internet.)

Basically, you need to avoid all the fun stuff. You’re a visually-oriented designer, maybe one proficient in all the wonderful things InDesign can do with type, and you’re going to want to create a visually impressive resume. Hold off on that and leave it for your portfolio. You may feel as though that’s tying your hands and amputating your legs, but you have to please those bots if your resume is going to get anywhere. Thus:

• keep formatting to a minimum;
• use color extremely sparingly;
• stick to a pair of widely-used fonts (the old rule of one serif font for body text and a sans-serif one for headings is always a good one to follow);
• use round or square bullets for the bullet points (and remember to leave off periods when those aren’t complete sentences); and
• underline sparingly and avoid italics (except for foreign words, such as cum laude).

As for things like the bars and stars to illustrate your proficiency in this, that, or the other skill that are available with some resume templates, forget them entirely. They may look nifty at first glance, but the fact is they’re pretty meaningless in terms of the information they convey, and they probably will make the bots gag.

There’s a problem here, of course. You’re a designer, and you’re expected to design. Your resume is the stepping stone to your portfolio, and it’s the first thing the Hiring Director will see of your design work. There ought to be some connection between your resume and your portfolio, but how do you do that when those darn bots are constraining you from crafting a crafty resume? The answer is you have to make do with what tools you have to build your resume and try to make a visual statement while keeping to ATS-friendly formatting rules. Think of it as a challenge to make something elegant and stylish using a very limited set of tools. It won’t be visually dazzling, but it can still make a good impression. With luck, it’ll get past the bots, and the humans who look at it will like it enough to check out your portfolio and get their socks knocked off.

Get a Professional Email Address

Your email address is going to get noticed, partly because it’s almost the first thing anyone will see reading your resume and because the human who is going to contact you for an interview is going to have to type it. As a result, make that task as easy as possible by getting yourself as simple and professional an email address as you can. You might just as well go with something as close as possible to your name at Gmail: it will look clean and uncomplicated, it’ll be easy to remember, and the price is right. Keep that as your job-search email, so you won’t have to face rejection emails every time you check your personal email.

Resist any and all temptation to do anything cute with the address. Plzgivemeajob@gmail isn’t going to cut it. Besides, it’s taken already.

No Address, No Photo

There are a few things that have no place in a resume. Current custom proscribes listing your full address, probably because no hiring director is quaint enough ever to want to send you an actual letter with a stamp on it. You can, however, put your city and state unless you’re eager to relocate for a job and don’t want to spoil your chances by making the hIring Director think you’re not local.

Although you’ll come across resume templates that include photos, the practice in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Ireland is not to use your image. A picture gives away too much information of which Hiring Directors are supposed to remain ignorant. Many Hiring Directors automatically circular-file resumes with photos for just this reason. (That said, you are expected to have a photo on your LinkedIn profile, so all those scruples come to naught, and the people looking at your profile there will get to find out that you’re too good-looking for the job that way.)

Quantify Your Successes

When spelling out the details of your professional achievements, always remember to stress results over duties. If you can put numbers to these results, all the better: “85% of platypodes surveyed agreed that my designs were effective, resulting in a 25% increase in sales Q/Q for Q3 2022” sounds a lot better than “the platypus I showed my designs to said they were nice.” There are jobs that don’t generate quantifiable results, but, if you’re in one in which success is spelled with numbers, use that in your resume. 

Use the Right File Format

Ah, but what is the right file format for a resume? Although there are plenty of possibilities, your choice essentially consists of whether you should submit it as a Word file (.doc or .docx) or as a PDF one. Your first instinct is most likely going to be to go with the latter, as it ensures that the formatting will stay where you put it and that no one can tamper with the text. Some job postings specify a .pdf format, and, in these cases, you should absolutely send them your resume in that format. Otherwise, you’re back to wanting to please the bots, and most of the evidence shows that they can read Word files more easily than Portable Document Format ones. Thus, when in doubt (and when it’s an option), go with the Word version of your resume and submit it as a .docx file. The ATSs don’t seem to care particularly about whether a file is .doc or .docx, so you needn’t worry too much on that account or assume that .doc will be even more legible than .docx.

Get Feedback

When you get dressed for a big date, you’ll invariably turn to someone in the house and ask, “how do I look?”. Your resume reduces you to that 8½” x 11” piece of paper, and you ought to give it the same treatment. By all means, show your resume to your family and friends. You may get some useful feedback as a result. But, while these well-wishers can be useful, what you really need is a resume critique from someone in a professional capacity. Don’t ask your current boss, of course, but if you happen to know someone who looks at resumes for a living, take advantage of that opportunity and politely ask for input. It can be invaluable.

Another means of evaluating your resume is right on your computer. The best way to fight a bot is with a bot, and saving and viewing a copy of your resume as a .txt file will give you a clear sense of how it’ll look when the beastly bots are through with it. This is a great way to catch excessive formatting and gives you a chance to see what the Hiring Director very likely may see as well.

Another route for obtaining a professional assessment of your resume is by going to the teachers who’ve helped you prepare for your career. Some schools include resume review services as a matter of course; Noble Desktop offers full 1:1 mentoring with its design certificate programs, including the Graphic Design Certificate, the UI Design Certificate, and the Motion Graphics Certificate. The mentoring services available include not only assistance with your schoolwork but also extensive job-search support and all-important resume feedback.

Learn the Skills to Become a Designer at Noble Desktop

If you wish to become a designer, Noble Desktop, a tech and design 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.