Designing Your Future:

Hints, tips and ideas on the design of your Résumé and Cover Letter

By Dr. Jennifer L. BowieFor Business Writing

The Résumé: Choosing your Fonts• Choose two fonts, one serif and one sans serif

– Use one font for your headings– Use the other for your body text

• Serif body text will give the résumé a more traditional, conservative, and often elegant tone. It is also more readable in long lines (if you have long lines).

– Good for older more established businesses and more conservative jobs.

• Sans Serif body font will give the résumé a more modern, technical feel. It is also more readable in shorter lines, which you will likely have. It will also add more white space to crowded résumé

– Good for jobs in the tech industry or jobs with more modern or causal companies

– For more conservative companies you may choose to only use one font, but two will lead to a much cleaner and clearer look

The Résumé: Formatting the Text• Headings:

– Use 1-2 levels of heading (1 best)– Differentiate the heading with white space, a contrasting

font, bold, and a larger size (at least 2 points larger than the body text, but 4+ points is better)

• Your name: should be the most noticeable item on the page, make it the title and make it bigger and more obvious than your headings

• Emphasis: – Use bold and/or italics where emphasis is needed– Do not use underlining or all caps (unless an ASCII

resume or designed to be read by computers then you can use all caps)

• Alignment: like all document designs, a single alignment creates a cleaner, more professional document, and this is especially true with often crowded résumés

Designing the Cover Letter• Use the same basic letter format (covered in

chapter 5)• Consider designing your own professional looking

letterhead to give the letter more of a distinctive look

• Try to match the design of the letter and the résumé for a clearly connected profession look– If you have a letterhead use it on the résumé too

(example: http://www.rhetcomp.gsu.edu/%7Ejbowie/Samples/resume/coverandresumeSara.doc )

– Use the same body font for both and consider putting your name and address info in the contrast font used on the résumé

Check out the examples to see this in practice!• Example:

– Old:

http://www.rhetcomp.gsu.edu/%7Ejbowie/Samples/resume/PsudoNym.doc

– New with 2 fonts: http://www.rhetcomp.gsu.edu/~jbowie/Samples/resume/PseudoNym3.doc

– New with 1 font: http://www.rhetcomp.gsu.edu/~jbowie/Samples/resume/PseudoNym2.doc

Have fun designing your future!