Does Your Resume Resemble a Ransom Note?

I ran across an interesting and rather amusing entry on Daryl Cagle’s Cartoon Web Log for March 18 in which he blasts a major newspaper for the degradation in quality of their front page in terms of graphic appeal. He counts and describes in detail no less than 22 font changes above the middle fold alone, in a re-designed look that violates one of the major no-no’s in graphic design: overuse of fonts. He describes each of them in a numbered list keyed to tags in a screen shot of the paper.

As an executive resume writer, I have reviewed and evaluated many thousands of resumes over the years, and all too often have seen well-intentioned word processing novices go completely overboard with fonts… 4 or 5 different font families, each used in all of its potential variations (bold, italic, bold italic, regular). Worse yet, they are sometimes inconsistently applied—headings at the same level feature different font faces and formatting. Eeeek!

So here’s a word of warning to any job searcher who would like to be taken seriously: Limit font faces in your resume to two, absolute maximum of three if you have a really good reason, and be sure to consistently apply bolding, italics, color, etc. throughout. If you find yourself irresistibly drawn to pressing that font key, a good way to introduce discipline into the process is to create styles for the heading levels in your document and stick to them!

Posted by Laurie Smith

Comments

[Jacob]

Love the title of this post. Good tip too :)

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