Redesign Project 4 - Resume

For my fourth redesign project, I decided to go ahead and finally tackle redesigning my resume. This task was much more difficult than I had originally anticipated. I found it extremely difficult to spice up my resume for a career in technical communication because the field is technical and I was hesitant to put much ‘spice’ into the redesign. We saw many exiting examples of off the wall resumes in class: some successful, some not so successful, but in the end, I decided to take a much more traditional approach to the resume to demonstrate my ability to produce professional, technical documents to future employers.

I started making changes to my original resume with moving the placement of my name and my contact information. I created two columns for my information, and centered my name above the first column and centered my contact information above the second. I originally had my contact information just below my name left-aligned, but realized that it looked too uneven and there was too much white space at the top right of the page. I think spreading out this information creates more of a sense of balance and cuts down on the unnecessary white space.

Since I am majoring in technical communication, I wanted to create a technical, professional looking document to showcase my ability to create such a document. I used neutral colors, mainly greens, but avoided using plain black and white text to add a sense of variety and excitement to an otherwise standard, bland document. I bolded the information that I felt was more important and/or impressive about myself and my academic achievements so far. I used standard Times New Roman font to make the text easy to read, though I think the color of the text adds a sufficient exotic touch.

My minor is in Natural Resource Management, so when deciding on what neutral colors to use in my resume I decided on natural looking greens and grays. Since I plan on someday working for an organization such as Texas Parks and Wildlife or other natural resource management agencies, I thought using earthy green tones would add a hint of nature, yet because the colors I used are still quite neutral, I am demonstrating that I understand the concepts of practicality in document making. I did use white font in the dark green highlighted portion of the first column so that the text would be clearly visible.

I used two brownish green lines at the top of the page to separate my name and my contact information from the rest of the information in the resume because that indicates that they are distinctly different sections. I also used a thin white line between the two columns of information because it subtly separates the categories of information from the items in each category. I did not use bullets to separate the different items in each category because I felt that it would look unprofessional  and would take up too much space on the page.