5 Essentials of a Graphic Design Resume

Essentials of a Graphic Design Resume

Bagging a graphic designer job in today’s world is not easy, especially when the competition is staring at you in the face. To beat this competition and take home the coveted job, composing an industry-relevant graphic designer resume is the best place to start.

So, here are the 5 essentials of a graphic designer resume that every graphic designer should know:

1. Keep it relevant and informative

There is no point in filling your resume with each and every trivial detail of your professional engagements if it is not relevant to the job that you are targeting.

You may be an experienced graphic designer or a fresh graduate who is hoping to land their first graphic designing gig, either way, the trick is to keep it relevant and to-the-point.

If you go overboard with unnecessary information, your resume will be reduced to a bizarre piece of paper which is flooded with information that does not seem to make sense. This means that mindlessly writing a seemingly less relevant resume can cost you your job.

For example, if you are writing a graphic designer resume, make sure that you follow these basic instructions:

Illustrate only those details in your resume that are relevant to a graphic designer’s job:

Applying to a graphic designer’s job would require that you have experience in graphic designing, are a graphic design graduate, or have done some relevant certification(s) in graphic designing.


If you don’t have the relevant experience, don’t just put anything in your resume. In such a scenario, simply mention your internships and certifications that attests to your skills in graphic designing. Make sure that even if you don’t have relevant work experience yet, you have the theoretical knowledge and some industry exposure.

Do not put information that will not help you get a graphic designer’s job:

In other words, you can skip details regarding a non-graphic designer internship or job that you may have done, or a volunteering experience that has zero relation with the graphic designer job that you’re chasing.

Quantify your achievements

As a graphic designer, what are the things that can be fittingly described as an achievement?

Identify them and replicate them in your resume. While you’re at it, make sure that you provide numbers wherever you can. Doing this will help you showcase the visible results of your roles & responsibilities.

For example, the following may be your achievement as a graphic designer:

Envisioned a new art-proofing system

But, getting more detailed and using numbers to describe your achievements helps you showcase the visible impact you have made with your skills and explains the far-reaching impacts of your achievement.

Envisioned a new art-proofing system leading to an overall increase in production quality & enhanced customer satisfaction to 97%

The above point is a classic example of action-oriented statements.

By showing a causal relationship between your contribution and the results of your contribution, you are giving any recruiter a good reason to hire you because you’re able to show your ability to bring results first hand.

Here’s an example of the professional experience section of a graphic designer resume:

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Present information under proper sections

According to Ladders, a recruiter spends roughly 6 seconds on a resume.

In other words, most recruiters who are evaluating your resume are super busy people who don’t enjoy the luxury of time. They just don’t have enough time on their hands to spend too much time evaluating a single resume.

If they have to explicitly look for information while going through your resume, chances are that they won’t even bother to assess your resume, which will drastically reduce your shortlist chances.

This means that you could be highly qualified for the job position, but because information was not effectively communicated in your resume, you did not get an interview call.

This is why your job before you get the job is to make the recruiter’s job simple. By helping the recruiter, you are helping yourself.

So, as a rule of thumb, make sure that information is effectively communicated and extremely visible to the recruiter.

Doing this will help your resume do the bare minimum of getting read.

To make things simple for you, here are the 7 must-have resume sections that you should put in your graphic designer resume:

• Header
• Personal Information
• Profile Title
• Summary / Objective
• Key Skills
• Professional Experience
• Education

If you have information that does not cover the scope of these sections, you can group them under these sections:

• Certifications
• Additional Information

Distinguish your core graphic designing skills from your technical expertise

Work experience or not, your graphic designing skills are what truly matters in the end.

If you are eyeing the coveted graphic designing job, something that will help is making a separate “key skills section” that fittingly endorses your graphic designing skills. Also, it is extremely important that you make a distinction between your core skills and your technical skills.

Here’s an example of what the skills section of your graphic designer resume should look like:

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In the above image, the core skills are separated from the technical skills.

If you don’t know what they are, here is an explanation of what core skills and technical skills mean in a graphic designer resume:

Core Skills for a Graphic Designer refers to particular skill sets that are unique to a graphic designer + other skills that he/she may have acquired during the course of his/her work experience in graphic designing.

Example: Sketching, Designing, Logo Creation, etc.

These skills are specific to a graphic designer. But while listing them in your graphic designer resume, you should distinguish them from your technical skills.

Technical Skills for a Graphic Designer refers to a Graphic Designer’s working knowledge of tools that he/she uses to perform his/her graphic designing roles & responsibilities.

Example: Adobe Illustrator, InDesign, Photoshop, etc.

Separating the two helps a recruiter easily identify your proficiency areas. If it matches the skill sets that the job vacancy requires, you’re more likely to get shortlisted and chosen over someone who is not particular about following this in their resume.

Customize your graphic designer resume according to each job listing

A major blunder that most graphic designers tend to make is the mistake of sending the same resume to each and every organization they seek employment in.

You may think that a one-for-all approach to resume writing may work, but it doesn’t.

Each organization may look for some basic fundamental requirements in a graphic designer, but the exact requirements they look for in a graphic designer becomes more distinguished and varied with the specific needs of that particular organization.

So, here is stepwise approach that you can take:

• Look for keywords in the job description of your target jobs.
• After you identify them, see if these keywords (a.k.a skill requirements) match your specific individual skills.
• Once you do this, reiterate those keywords in your resume as long as you have actual expertise and experience in those keywords or skills.
• Repeat this cycle and make a unique resume for each job.
• Doing this will help you customize your resume according to every single one of your target jobs.
• When you compose a unique resume for every single one of your target jobs, you’re able to best address your qualities & suitability for that job.

Moreover, organic keyword insertion in strategic places all over your graphic designer resume will have a higher chance of getting parse by ATS (recruitment bots) which means that even your chances of getting shortlisted will increase.

Moreover, you should also remember that most recruiters who evaluate your resume are not industry experts. They’re simply hiring for the graphic designer position without having much domain knowledge about graphic designing.

So seeing these keywords will also act as a psychological motivator for a recruiter and encourage them to shortlist you for the said role.

Conclusion:

The guidelines we have outlined in this article will help you write an impeccable graphic designer resume that will inevitably help you increase your chances of getting shortlisted.

Landing a graphic designer job in the 21st century demands that you are an excellent graphic designer. But at the same time, it also demands that you’re an excellent resume tactician with the ability to perfectly showcase your graphic designing expertise in your resume.

Here’s a brief summary of the key takeaways of this article: 

• Your graphic designer resume should be relevant. All the elements that go into it should be aimed at helping you land a shortlist. Don’t include anything that in no way helps you advance your job application for the graphic designer job that you’re after.
• Illustrate your achievements and quantify them wherever possible in your resume.
• Organize information in your resume within appropriate resume sections. This helps a recruiter identify important pieces of information as all they have to do is look under the relevant section.
• Distinguish your core graphic designing skills from your technical skills.
• Do not send a generic resume for all the jobs that you are targeting. Customize your resume according to each of your target jobs.

Author’s Bio:

Aditya Sharma


On a quest to help professionals across the world land their dream jobs, Aditya lives and breathes Hiration — an AI-powered online resume builder and platform to help job-seekers find their way in the treacherous job market where he’s a Co-Founder and the unofficial CPO (Chief Problem-solving Officer). He likes to code away his days and nights when he’s not busy disrupting the career space.