Elevate Your Resume Design to Capture Attention [15+ Inspiring Examples]

Job hunting is treacherous and uncertain, and writing a professional resume never seems easy. Your resume that sums up who you are, explains what you’ve accomplished, and persuades the hiring manager for you. That’s crucial, but there’s also resume design. 

Resume design is about how you present your resume, about the colors, layout, and font choice that sends out the message about your personality. Before they even read a word, your creative resume design is actually the first thing that gets their attention. 

Spending some time on your resume design will increase your chance of standing out from the crowd. Take a look at our resume design step-by-step guide and make a professional resume!

This article will show you the best resume design ideas and unique design templates to inspire your professional resume, how to design a resume that will win your dream job, what sections to put in a resume and some resume design layout tips that make your resume unique.

1. This simple resume design template by Cake is free and ideal for entry-level applicants to highlight experience and education.

2. This classic resume design template by Cake is excellent for experienced candidates who want to focus on the content.

3. This academic resume design template by Cake uses background color to highlight non-experience section accomplishments such as publications, skills, or conference experience.

4. Chung Ping Tseng is a product manager. This resume design uses Cake 's resume design tool with a black background and a simple timeline to keep everything organized.

5. Fiona's resume design uses a stylish font for name and headers, and keeps everything else simple.

6. Kaiwei Wang’s resume uses consistent color and little squares to differentiate each section.

7. Sarah Beth Doncals uses emojis to give her resume design a touch of playfulness.

8. This creative and unique resume design template created by pikisuperstar uses balanced gradient color to express a friendly personality.

9. This clean resume template uses a lot of white space to maintain a minimalist design.

10. This simple resume design uses lines and blocks to separate each section.

11. This minimalist resume is designed with a neutral color to make reading comfortable.

12. This professional resume design from rawpixel.com has big section titles and is well organized.

13. This unique resume design uses four colors, including five levels of grays, but is still balanced.

14. This is a playful and creative resume design by Kristen Altomare-Ciallella. She uses different font sizes to create sections and variations.

15. This simple resume design by Annette Hong is divided into four grids to make it look well ordered.

16. This classic resume template is elegant and neat.

17. This professional resume design by Elias Ruiz uses programming fonts to align with his job role.

18. This black and simple resume design by Dominik Wurm is good for creative designers.

19. This clean resume design is good for any applicant with its simplicity.

20. This minimal resume design allows you to fill in comprehensive details.

For job applicants, making too unique resume design can be a headache. Nevertheless, whether you choose to design your resume with Microsoft Word, Illustrator, or Cake, as long as you pay attention to the steps below, there’s no need to worry.

An effective resume design should help you get noticed at first sight. The resume layout should be simple, clean, easy-to-read, and professional. 

1. Choose the right resume format

Before starting on your professional resume design, there are three resume formats to choose from: chronological resume format, functional resume format, and combination resume format.

Consider your experience level, your strengths, and the job you’re applying for. The resume format will set the basic structure for your resume design.  

2. Decide on an easy-to-read font

Choose an easy-to-read font. Stick to one font that offers variations, which means it has more than one weight, such as regular, medium, and bold. You can use different font weights to create clear sections and save more space.

The font you choose should be simple and elegant: avoid using funky or dramatic fonts. Imagine reading an accountant's resume that uses a gothic font. There’s no need to horrify your hiring manager like that.   

3. Set appropriate margins

Leaving enough space is another secret to a simple and professional resume design. Usually, a one-inch margin is sufficient. The ideal borders should be identical on each side of your resume. To make a more minimalist resume design, you can increase your margin up to 1.5 inches. 

4. Include necessary information

Once you’ve set up the working space and font as your basic resume design, you can start adding the content. That include the 5 main resume sections:

As for how to write each section, read down below in our next paragraph.  

5. Add bullet points, bold texts, and colors to make the resume stand out

Once you’ve finished your resume content, you can refine your resume design. Here are three aspects to make your resume look simple and organized:

• Bullet points are useful if there are accomplishments to highlight.
• Bold texts allow you to assign clear and simple resume design structures.
• Finally, you can choose a color to add a simple and elegant touch that completes your resume design. 

If you are wondering how to put together a resume, here are five main sections that’ll help you create your resume layout.

• Resume Header
  
• Resume Summary
• Work Experience
• Skills
• Education

Resume Header

A resume header is a section where you include all the essential information about yourself. When designing your resume header, keep your basic information clear and easy to read.

Example of a resume header design:

Resume Summary

A resume summary is a short paragraph, usually 3-5 sentences, that sums up your professional career highlights and your specialty. The hiring manager will read the summary to quickly get an idea of who you are.

Here's an example of a resume summary:

Work Experience

When writing your work experience, be sure to tailor the descriptions to the job post. The most recent experience should always come first. Moreover, the font you choose will work really well here and make your resume design unique.

Here’s how to write your experience in a resume:

Skills

In the skills section, you should organize the essential skills for the job role. The skills section should be simple, relevant, and incisive. Bring up the hard skills that are required, and add some soft skills to demonstrate your characteristics. Use fonts to make sure the skills are tidy and categorized.

Here's an example of listing skills in a resume: 

Education

If you’ve got an advanced degree, list it before your undergraduate or high school degree. When listing your education, you should include these four elements:

For amateurs who are not so skilled with design, here are 5 tips to keep in mind. These are the golden rules to follow so you won’t slide off track unknowingly. 

💡 Utilize color, font, and visual elements to make the resume header stand out

If you want to make a creative or simple resume design, one trick is to make good use of colors, fonts, or visual elements such as icons.

You can play with your font by choosing the company’s logo color or other colors that represent your personality. In addition, placing a simple icon by the title of each section will make your resume easier to read. 

💡 Make the most of white space

You might be anxious when designing your resume, and want to fill up the white space with texts. However, white space is also functional, if you want a clean, minimalist, and simple resume design.

Think of white space as your friend, you want it to play balance with what you have. It will give the hiring manager more space to read and process the information comfortably.

💡 Keep the resume design clear and clean

One more thing to monitor when you design your resume is to keep it clear and clean. There’s no need to stuff up the resume with images or make it colorful. 

💡 Make sure the resume design is compliant with the industry standard

Always read the application requirements. Oftentimes, the hiring manager asks the applicants to send a certain file type such as PDF or word. In addition, for more rigid industries and value professionalism, it’s advised to keep your resume design simple.

💡 Improve the readability of the resume

Last but not least, the readability of your resume is just as important as how it looks. As the hiring manager often spends only a little time on each resume, a resume designed to be read easily will have more chances to be noticed and remembered. Check the font style as well as sizes to make sure the content and title are easy for a quick glance.

For applicants who want to save time on resume design, it’s ideal to use resume design templates. Here are two ways for you to find creative, professional, simple, or modern resumes design templates for free. 

1. Cake

With Cake, you can get free resume design tools to create either a professional resume design, modern resume design, simple resume design, minimal resume design, clean resume design, or any other styles you want.

Follow the steps below:

• Register
  You can register easily with Facebook, Google, Twitter, or Apple account, or simply type your email address. 
• Choose a resume design template
  You can always change your mind and select another resume template.
• Type in the necessary information
  You can also import a recent resume file to save time on filling in the information! Moreover, you can find inspiring resume examples categorized into different job roles from our resume pool.
• Adjust the resume layout
  If you want to customize your resume, you can do so easily. Adjust the layout, fonts, and organization to finalize your resume design.
• Download resume PDF or share it online
  That’s it! You can save your resume design in PDF files and share it online directly!

2. Microsoft Word

• Open Microsoft Word and go to “File” > “New".
• Click on “more templates” or type “resume” in the search box.
• Choose a resume design template that suits you.
• Click on “Create”. 
• Start editing the content and filling in your information!