Designer Resume Sample

As a designer, you probably know a thing or two about eye-catching resume design. However, creating a successful resume for a design job isn’t just about creativity.

Higher paying jobs for designers like Art Director roles are extremely competitive. To get a job in this industry, your resume needs to quickly and clearly communicate your skills and accomplishments to employers.

To help do that, here are four tips for writing an job-winning designer resume:

1. Highlight your designer resume skills

Employers in the design industry are always looking for candidates who have a well-developed set of skills, especially when it comes to design-related software. To impress them, make sure the skills section of your resume showcases your most marketable and up-to-date design expertise.

To show prospective employers that you have the skills needed for the position, here are some commonly required designer skills:

Additionally, make sure to include a mix of hard and soft skills on your design resume. This helps demonstrate to employers that you’re a well-rounded candidate capable of meeting deadlines, multitasking, thinking creatively, and problem-solving, in addition to meeting the basic technical skills required for the job.

2. Open with a strong designer resume summary

A resume summary serves as a “greatest hits” of your resume, quickly communicating your most relevant skills and important accomplishments to employers. This makes it ideal for designers, because hiring managers for design jobs typically have little time to read through each resume. They’ll want to see your notable qualifications right away.

For design jobs, you want your resume summary to communicate three important things:

1. Years of design experience, job title/s, and your main responsibilities (creating infographics, UI / UX related tasks, etc.)
2. Professional successes completing or managing projects (include URLs when possible)
3. Your most valuable hard skills or qualifications (Adobe Creative Suite certified, any web design skills, etc.)

To see what this looks like in action, here’s an example of a strong designer resume summary:

Designer Resume Summary

Creative and self-driven design professional with 9+ years of experience creating and delivering elegant, innovative design solutions that excite consumers and grow iconic brands. Skilled in leading multiple projects from concept through to completion. Hands-on in transforming complex information and concepts into attractive, human-centered designs.

3. Choose the optimal resume format

There’s no perfect resume format for designers.

However, if you already have experience working in design a chronological resume is your best choice. The chronological resume format lists your most recent work history at the top, and quickly demonstrates you have recent (and relevant) work experience and are up-to-date with current design software and practices.

Additionally, unless you’re fresh out of Design School (or have employment gaps), list your professional experience as a designer at the top of your resume, with your education towards the bottom.

4. Include strong designer action verbs

Lastly, you can make your resume stronger by including strong designer resume action verbs in your experience section and summary.

Specific verbs make your resume come alive and illustrate the impact your design efforts made at your previous job. For example, while you may be tempted to say you “designed” various projects (you’re a designer, after all), using action-specific verbs makes your resume more engaging to read and helps showcase more of your skills.

Hiring managers want to see all those skills you have in action, so in addition to providing a portfolio of your work, use examples on your resume that illustrate your accomplishments. Here’s a list of verbs relevant to designer jobs to help improve your resume experience section:

Try mixing up your action verbs to show what you can do. The variety will keep a hiring manager engaged and more likely to check out examples of your actual work.