Design CVs
04.25.10
If you google hunt curriculum vitae and related information on the internet, a couple of things happen. You get a lot of career advice sites coming back at you; you get a couple of wikepedia sites and then you get some image results.
At some point, you will probably arrive on this page via the image search.
I’m slightly caught between a couple of stools here. I really feel that it should be possible to leverage the internet and technology to create a striking CV and there are some striking CVs on that page. A significant number of them fail in one key area. Many of the CVs where the emphasis is on form completely miss the function. Too many of them are beautiful and too difficult to get the information out of. The over-reliance on strong graphics makes some of the examples look like overdone business cards; the information in them lacks somewhat.
I don’t, however, work in the design front so it is possible that design professionals don’t care about the information on the CVs if the appearance is impressive in and of itself. The comments seem to reflect my opinion however: if your cv is hard to read, it’s hard to read, end of story.
Way back in the days when I was changing job every 18 months or so – and before the internet really took hold – I used to see a lot of CVs. A lot of them had a lot of information in them that was difficult to digest. They were laid out with whatever new toys the applicant had learned in Word. Some of them had really badly printed photographs from the early inkjet technology.
In this way, technology is not being used appropriately and this is disappointing.
The most effective CV I had over the course of my life was a single page CV. Admittedly I was 25 years old at the time and therefore had less information. I did, however, have friends with 3 page CVs on less experience than me. Having looked at modern technology and design and layout tools, you’d assume that it may be possible to leverage those tools more effectively than the historic two page introductory special. Unfortunately, there isn’t a lot of evidence out there to suggest this may be the case.