MB Resume Builder
Resume landing pages
Template Guide
A designer's resume is judged twice: as a document and as a piece of design. This page covers how to let a clean, structured layout show your judgement while your portfolio carries the visual work, and when a bolder design is the right call.
Preview
Studio Grid
Who this template suits
This template suits brand, editorial, packaging and digital designers applying to agencies, studios and in-house creative teams, where the reviewer is a creative lead who will open your portfolio next.
It fits designers who apply both ways: through job portals, where the layout still parses well, and directly to a studio, where a balanced grid shows you can organise information without decoration getting in the way.
If you are sending a resume straight to a creative director who has asked for something expressive, the gallery's Creative/Direct Submission designs may suit you better. Check each one's parseability score first; they vary widely.
Before and after
Every applicant lists the same tools. What the work was, for whom and what you delivered is what a creative lead is trying to find before opening your portfolio.
Design is judged on results as well as craft. A before-and-after in time, cost or adoption shows you understood the problem the design solved.
Reviewers look for the portfolio first. Available on request adds a step they may not take; an address beside your contact details removes it.
ATS compatibility
The layout scores 85 of 100 (strong) on our Template Parseability Score. It loses 11 points for its two-column body, which some parsers read across rather than down. Contact details still come out before work history, and Experience, Education and Skills use headings a parser recognises.
The icons are decoration; every piece of content, including each skill chip, is real text. There are no tables or skill bars, and email, phone and dates extract as plain text.
In our scoring run, 9 of 10 sample content fragments came out intact; the tenth was not found, which usually means two neighbouring pieces of text ran together. Copy the text out of your exported PDF once and check that job titles and company names read cleanly.
The circle at the top of the side column shows your initials; the builder does not add photos. The score counts it as space reserved for a photo, which costs 3 points.
Section by section
Phone, email, location and your portfolio address sit together in the side column. The layout shows the website field, or your first link when that field is empty, so put the portfolio there.
Two lines: your discipline and years, and the kind of work you lead. Leave style adjectives out; the portfolio shows your style.
It sits above Experience in the main column, so keep it to degree, school and dates and let your work history start high on the page.
For each role, two or three lines on what you designed, for whom and what it achieved. Add three to five projects after that if they point to matching pages in your portfolio.
The layout merges skill groups into one list of chips without group names, so order them: disciplines first, then the tools you use in real projects.
It should be well designed, which is not the same as decorated. Hierarchy, spacing and typography show your judgement and still parse. Save expressive layouts for resumes sent directly to a person who has asked for them.
With your contact details, as a short working address. Reviewers look for it first, and a link at the bottom of the page or a note that it is available on request costs you views.
Often. Many employers, agencies included, take applications through applicant tracking systems. This layout scores strongly for parsing; the gallery's Creative/Direct Submission designs vary widely, so check a design's score before sending it through a portal.
No. List the tools you use in real work, after your disciplines. A long list of tools reads as padding and pushes out evidence of what you have made.
Ready to build
Start with the graphic designer resume template, tailor the content, and export a polished resume in minutes.
Education
BFA, Communication Design
Texas State University
Experience
Senior Graphic Designer
Fieldnote Studio
Austin, TX
Graphic Designer
Brightwell Publishing
Dallas, TX