Design

The designer CV problem: it is not the portfolio

The instinct to design the CV itself is the one to resist. A beautifully typeset document that a parser turns into a column of fragments loses before anybody sees the typesetting.

Your portfolio is where the craft is judged. The CV has a narrower job: get you into the pile where somebody opens the portfolio link. It is a routing document, and routing documents are plain on purpose.

The second thing designers under-sell is outcome. Redesigned the onboarding is a task; cut drop-off at step two from 34% to 19% is the same work described in a way a hiring manager can take to their own boss.

Let the CV be plain

Every device that makes a CV look designed is a device that makes it parse badly: text in shapes, a sidebar that reads as a second document, a timeline drawn with rules, icons where words should be. Spend the craft on the portfolio and on the writing.

  • One portfolio link, written out in full, in the contact block and not behind an icon.
  • Name the tools as words, Figma, After Effects, because that is the string somebody searches.
  • Keep one accent colour and one type family. A CV is not the place to show range.

Describe decisions, not deliverables

A list of screens shipped says what you were assigned. What a hiring manager is buying is judgement: the constraint you found, the option you rejected, the measurement that told you it worked. Two or three bullets in that form are worth a page of deliverables.

  • Say who the users were and how many of them there were.
  • Give the before and the after, with the number that separates them.
  • Say what you owned and what the team owned; a solo claim on a large product reads as a stretch.

Common questions

Should I send a designed PDF or a plain one?
A plain one to the application form, and the designed work behind the portfolio link inside it. If you want one artefact for both, keep the layout simple enough that selecting all the text and pasting it somewhere still reads in the right order: that is roughly what the parser gets.
Do I need a photograph?
It depends where you are applying. It is customary in Italy, Spain and Germany, and actively discouraged in the United Kingdom, Ireland and the United States, where it invites a bias complaint. Keep two versions of the file rather than compromising on one.

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