Today’s Plan:
- Share resumes (15 minutes)
- Resume Revision (10 minutes)
- Designer Resume Assignment (20-25 minutes)
Share Resumes
Due to some unclear instructions on my part, there is a chance you have 4 resumes with you today or only 2. Whoops. Here’s what I would like you to do:
- Find a partner who does not sit in the same row as you. Branch out, meet some new people
- Give them two different versions of your resume
- Take 5 minutes to review the different resumes. You should check for:
- Alignment (examine margins)
- Hierarchy (how well does the document prioritize important information?
- White Space (does this feel open or crowded?)
- Typography (font choices–drill down, what do you think of the pairings? Think about serifs, stress, x-height–all the things we talked about last class and WSINYE covered)
- Obviously, 5 minutes is not a lot of time–but I’m looking for your impression, what you see. What is your gut response?
- Take five minutes to talk about person #1’s resumes
- Take five minutes to talk about person #2’s resumes
Resume Revision
Take 10 minutes to revise one of your resumes. Upload this file to Canvas.
Designer Resume Assignment
I consider this a practical assignment–and I *think* this is the last thing we will design without an Adobe software. I want you to use Canva for this assignment. You will evaluate and select a Canva resume template. This assignment is as much about learning how to evaluate a template (and, thus, evaluate other people’s design work) as it is about learning how to manipulate a template in Canva.
Design is fundamentally a way of seeing the world. Like literary close reading, it is looking beyond the surface to understand the inner workings. In writing classes, I often cite a quote from Robert Pinsky, the former Poet Laureate. I was lucky enough to attend a lecture by Pinsky; during the Q&A after his talk, a graduate student asked him a fairly sophomoric question: “how do I become a good poet?” Despite the question, I was entranced by his answer: “You learn to read like a good chef eats.” That is, we learn to taste not only the flavor (the sensory experience), but through that sensory experience we re-imagine the process that brought it into being. Good food is effortless, but good cooking is not. We have to bring that investment, that effort, to the surface.
At the same time, we need to construct an almost subconscious rubric that let’s us see mistakes (not as mistakes but as unrealized possibility). So that’s what this assignment is about–how do we take some of the rules and guides that we’ve covered so far, our readings in WSINYE, and put them to use analyzing a visual (even as we are in the process of constructing it).
The criteria I listed above give us a starting point for what to look for, but let me flush that out a bit drawing (mostly) upon our WSINYE readings:
- Alignment (how clean? how many lines?)
- Space (is there sufficient negative space? Is there jungles of text?
- Contrast?
- Focal point?
- Hierarchy?
- Color? (what are the emotional resonances of the colors? where do the colors appear in nature? what are the likely cultural associations of the colors you choose? ALSO: what colors does the job to which you are applying use on their website?
- Typography? (what fonts, what are the values/associations of those fonts?)
Let’s look at some curated design resumes.
Let’s look at some out-of-the-box creative designer resumes.
Let’s look at some Canva templates.
Classwork / Homework
I would like you to write a brief resume evaluation memo for three different Canva templates. This memo should not exceed 350 words. The memo will begin by informing me which of the three you will use for your Designer Resume Assignment–highlighting its strengths and acknowledging potential weaknesses. The memo should then dedicate a paragraph to each of the other templates, noting strengths/what initially attracted you to the template, but also highlighting why these would be suboptimal choices.
Before you write the memo, apply each of the criteria above to each of your three Canva templates. You don’t need to share this research with me, but this should help you decide which of the three you will select. While it might seem unnecessary, attempting to apply each of the criteria above to a template might open different ways of seeing it–it is an exercise in focused attention.
In the professional world, memos are often emails; although they can be more formal documents distributed at meetings (say a project manager asked you to review a content management system, that memo would be written to be distributed to a wider network of people). Blah, blah, blah.
For simplicity’s sake, I’m going to have you submit the memo as a text input via Canvas. Write the memo anywhere you want, and copy/paste it into Canvas.
Bring your InDesign book to class on Friday.
