The Design Must Be A Looker

Resume Design

I have two words for you - 'White Space'. The other words are 'Legibility" and 'Eye Appeal'. Your resume is a marketing piece that must follow the rules of good design. It must be attractive enough to survive that first 10 second scan.

Do you have too much to say to follow good design principles? Better to say too little and have the resume read than having it sent straight to the trash.

Having too much to say probably means you have a forest and trees kind of problem. Post your resume on the community forum to get help whittling it to the essentials.

A resume should never be more than two pages. More can be overwhelming. Have a list of 50 articles you want to include? Say that you wrote 50 articles and mention that the details are on a separate list attached to the resume. There is never an excuse for more than two pages.

White Space

This makes the resume easy to follow. Resumes can be similar, but the order and titles of the sections can be different.

Legibility

Lose that temptation to use an 8 pt font. Keep it at 10 to 12 pts.

Eye Appeal

Use just one font with sparing use of different sizes and bolding. When you highlight too much, you end up highlighting nothing.

Use consistent margins and indentation. Be meticulous - even a misplaced space can be jarring.

Font Choice

This is a personal prejudice: Do not use Times New Roman. It's a font for the ages, but it is plodding and fights a contemporary look. I prefer one of the more elegant or interesting sans-serif fonts such as Trebuchet, Verdana and Tahoma.

If you have too little or too much content, sometimes changing the font size by half a point or changing the font is all that is needed to make it just right. The four examples below show the same text, but as you can see, they use a different amount of space. Play with the more legible fonts available on your computer.

Important: If you use a font that may not be common to all computers, only distribute pdf versions of your resume and make sure that the font is embedded in the pdf. Otherwise, you lose control of the formatting, and what looks good on your computer can look horrible on another.