A CV (Curriculum Vitae) is a concise, formal document that will summarise information about myself including education, skills and experience which will be relevant and interesting for potential employers. It is important that this document not only contains appropriate information, but also illustrates this concept in a clear, neat format that can be easily scanned.
Prior to designing this document, I organised content describing my education, skills and work experience into summarised sections. These bullet points outlines the most interesting and relevant information about these subjects including: dates achievements were completed; skills and certifications I achieved from these experiences; and contact information.
After creating content for my CV, I began to consider how this information will be structured on a A4 document to ensure it can be easily read and understood by potential employers.
I began to sketch out an information hierarchy on paper (as can be seen below), considering what content was most relevant to the employer including my name, role I wish to apply for and contact information. Considering how an individual naturally scans a page, it was important that this data is at the top of the document where it will be immediately seen and easily revisited.
My initial CV content is a composed in a one column document on Microsoft Word. This one column structure creates an unnecessarily long document covering several pages which make it impossible to navigate and scan quickly. To solve this issue, I planned to condense this content and create a one page document. I began to sketch out and experiment with different compositions which organised the larger bodies of text into columns and grids. I concluded that two columns containing the four sections provided the most clarity.
I also explored how I could include the dates of my education and work experience in an interesting visual timeline that doesn’t distract from the more interesting text. I decided to create a short timeline visual that differentiates this data consistently from bullet points.
After creating a clear composition, I began to evolve my sketches on Figma. At this stage, I was able to start considered visual hierarchy like text size, colour and typefaces which will enhance the document’s readability. I concluded that my name, role and sections headings will be larger than the main body text to act as a marker that the reader can easily locate.
Content Designer and Strategist, Sarah Richard’s redesign of the UK Government website is a really great example of structuring large bodies of content into a consistent structure that optimises readability and navigation. According to the UK Government’s visual guidelines, their website paragraphs should contain no more than 24 words per line to ensure the reader. The guidelines note that sentences should contain a maximum of 14 words. Writing guru Ann Wylie describes research showing an average 14 word sentence allowed readers to understand more than 90% of its content. Wylie compared this to a sentence containing 43 words: readers only understood 10% of the content on their first read.
The government website’s responsive design adapts sentence length on an average mobile screen to a maximum of 11 words. This paragraph width is similar to the size of the individual columns I planned on divided my A4 document into. Therefore, I ensured my paragraph contained around 12 words per line to ensure it can be scanned efficiently.
I also refined that A4 document to ensure it has consistent margins and gutters to ensure that the format is consistent and tidy. Not only does consistent spacing and alignment appear aesthetically clean; it’s consistency also enhances the reader’s ability to navigate sections easily.