Graphic Design Resumé

I meant to add in my brief that I changed the font and I started a new portfolio site, so my Facebook artist page is no longer listed on my resumé.

Niki, the first thing I noticed was the need for an ffi ligature in your name up at the top of the page. If the font you chose doesn't offer that, I would change to one that does.

Other nitpicks:

Why do you highlight your current military service but not your current and past professional design experience? That seems inconsistent to me with seeking a design job.

A 13-year-old community college design award? Not impressing me.

I would delete the "acquired skills" line at the top of your job description bullets and rewrite these details accordingly. I still believe that you are emphasizing the wrong things (what they jobs did for you rather than what you did for your employer).

I would exchange the positions of "college degree" and "education."

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The boxed items on the right are unnecessary imho. Remove those and try to add a little space between each section - there's some free space at the bottom between the portfolio and references. You could also move the indented items further in to make them stand out more.

Definitely 1000% better than the first one. Nobody would have read the first one.

yeah, i find the boxes a bit distracting too. if they served a unique purpose, i could deal. but they are really just redundant.

Here's what I have now. My original purpose for the tabs on the right side were to have some kind of visual appeal to make each of the sections stand out (sort of a "folder tab" effect) and to make my resumé stand out as a whole so as to be professional and sophisticated, but at the same time not blend in and look just like everyone else's. I see your point about them being redundant, so I adjusted them so that they don't just repeat what's already there. I took them out entirely, but felt like I had a little too much blank white space so I made them smaller and put them back in...let me know if you think it looks any better than it did.

Much better but does anyone feel that they're competing with the main headings of education/ experience/ awards? I'd combine them all into one beautiful header per needed section.

So much better, Niki! :) I'm especially delighted that you're now highlighting your design experience. That said, however, I note that you give considerably more space to your military reserve work. If you're applying for design jobs, I think one bullet point would suffice. Find a way to summarize the importance of your work on a grander scale than filling out paperwork; e.g., "Maintain rigorous safety standards through logistics administration and aircraft inspections." If you decide to keep all the detail instead, please correct your sloppy left insets in that section.

I'm not going to tell you what exactly to say about your resent and past design experience, but I do think that if you carve down the Air National Guard section, you'll have room to sell your freelance work more effectively. Right now, it tells me nothing about what kinds of clients you work with, how you help their businesses, what kinds of design work you produce, etc.

You shouldn't put your graduation date and GPA on the same line as the name of the school. The GPA doesn't even really belong there -- stating this, to me, makes you seem very immature. (There was a joke in my college that you can always tell incoming freshmen because they're still comparing SAT scores with each other -- and it was true!) If you want to brag about graduating with a B average, do it as part of the description of the degree. I would leave it out entirely. The year of your graduation is normally included just before or after the name of the degree you earned.

I would reverse the order of your awards from Isothermal so the repetition isn't so obvious, like so:

Dean's List — (note the em dash) Isothermal Community College, 2010
First Place Winner, Anuran Magazine (note the italics, which is the typographic standard for magazine titles, but if you insist on using quotation marks, they should be double ones; this is no place to trot out your own personal stylebook!) Cover Design Contest — Isothermal Community College, 2009
Top Three Finalist, "Together for Hope" Quill.com Facebook Design Challenge, 2009 (note I left out "online" -- that's obvious when you say Facebook

If you choose to leave this section as you did it, please fix the alignment of the years and the colon following them; you can do that by inserting a tab and making it align on the colon. all these little typesetting goofs are not flattering. This is your profession. It has to be right.

Is there anything interesting you can add to your Air National Guard service, such as being close to Kitty Hawk, where the Wright Brothers developed powered flight and how cool that is? Or at least, in the same state? That is revealing about your personality without making it be about you.

Would you consider using bullets (•) instead of asterisks (*) for your bullets? The asterisks seem awfully 1965 Smith-Corona portable typewritery to me. Again, given your profession, you need to be using all the basic tricks of the typographer's trade as well as good overall design. An art director would notice these things and question your skill level.

i still say that the right boxes are superfluous. and borderline insulting. as the reader i get the feeling that you either:
1. think im stupid and don't get the nature of each section
2. have a light resume and are just trying to fluff it up

either way, if i received the resume, i'd immediately put you in the no or at best maybe pile. because the goal of design (in my head) is to say as much as you can, with as little as possible.

The resume has come a long way, Niki. I kind of feel like we're beating you up at this point - but if you want some more help, I'll rapid fire some more at you...

1. Take Mara's advice - lots of good info in there. In all likelihood, your entry level job will involve a lot of typography. So an impeccable resumé is the easiest, fastest way to impress. Addendum to her info - hold down the OPTION key with the asterisk to get a regular bullet (•) OR use a dingbat (square, diamond, whatever) if you like.

2. Ditch the black boxes. Might have been a good idea for 2 pages - not for 1.

3. Ditch the grey box around proficiencies too. Looks both outdated and extraneous - a regular header will do.

4. Lose the "http". Basically passé these days (no color either - unless you want to use it everywhere)

5. Cut "Awards and Recognitions" down to one or the other - Awards OR Recognitions. It's so long it's overpowering the other headers - almost looks like a different (bolder) font to me.

6. Learn something new. If you are using Quark.... place your cursor to the left of the C in "Creating illustrations..." Now hit Command-\ (backslash). If it worked, all your dropped text should now line up to the left of the C where you had the cursor (instead of lining up under the bullet/asterisk). If you are using InDesign, you can do it thru the menus...

Choose Type > Insert Special Character > Other > Indent To Here.

I've always called that a "forced indent" but apparently it's also referred to as "indent to here". One of those little things that is a quick, easy way to impress someone who knows typography. One note: it doesn't work with manual returns (which are new paragraphs) - so if you want to manually return and still get the forced indent - use SHIFT-RETURN instead of just hitting the RETURN key.

Hope that helps. :-)

New version with tabs removed and different font because the other one I was using didn't have an option for italics...

much better all around!

All righty then! All you need to do is fix the left indents on the first bullet under freelancing (I'm surprised you're having a problem with that) and use a comma before your year of graduation, just as you did with the awards, instead of a hyphen.

Good luck!

Yes - very good. Compare the original to this and you'll see a huge difference. If you want one last suggestion - move the entire middle section (everything from "Experience" to the website URL - down a few points. It's a little tight to the top as compared to the bottom. That's it - done - I'm zipping it up now.

Just fyi... I have kept my resume at one page the entire time since graduation. People tend to zone out or be overwhelmed if you give them too much - so I've even removed things that were once deemed fairly important rather than expand to another page.

Good job.

Thanks everyone for the help, I really appreciate it. @Art...I don't feel beaten up at all. If I couldn't take criticism, I would never get any better at what I'm trying to do. :)