CV:
In thinking of my CV design I went back to my first two attempts, from second year and the year after (when I was on a Leave of Absence).
My first attempt had a Victorian theme, and while I don’t dislike it I can recognise now that it is overdesigned and hard to skim. My second was more pared-back in comparison. I referenced design work from the 1960s and 70s, and again I don’t think it’s bad but it doesn’t quite represent my personality, and I think it’s also hard to read quickly.
So with my previous attempts and the mistakes I made in them in mind, I started researching CV designs with a simpler, minimalist approach, leading me to the three examples below:
These three struck me as great examples of legible, yet slightly unconventional design for a creative CV that was in line with what I wanted for myself.
I decided early on that if I had a portrait or drawing in my CV and business cards that it would be a cat in vintage clothes, subtly tying my industry-facing material into my film. That way I figured if a potential employer had seen my film they might make a connection and remember my work (fondly, hopefully).
When I started trying to expand upon this design in Photoshop (above was sketched in Procreate) I ended up changing the layout as I found it tricky to make my text work in that format, but I still retained the mindset of simplicity and legibility.
I used a font called ‘Gil Modern’ for my titles which I’ve come to love. This font has very clear historical roots, but with a modern influence that allows it to be ornamental and legible in equal measure. For the main text I used a sans serif called ‘Casablanca URW’ that goes nicely in the context of my design.
I considered foregoing any colour or avatar drawing, but on second thought found this too plain.
So I ended up with this:
My little cat character is dressed for the 1950s, his tie blowing in the wind taking up some empty space and better framing the first paragraph of text. For his fur I used colours close to my film’s main character, but surrounded it with blue, pink and green, since they’re important colours in my film, as mentioned in my poster design write-up. I used the same colours in a slim gradient down the left side of the page, which is meant to guide your eye from top to bottom while balancing the amount of colour in the design.
Business Card:
When I first started exploring business card design I went in a lot of directions. As with the CV, however I latched on to having a cat character somewhere on the card as a representative of my work and myself. That will be especially relevant to my business card, since I will at some point have them free to take as a part of my end of year show display.
Acting on Henry’s advice, I chose number 11 of the above 12 to take further. I tried it with sans serif fonts, but it didn’t quite meet the feeling I was going for.
The designs above featuring white text on black put me in mind of silent film intertitles (below), which I liked because of my film’s relation to classic cinema.
I did attempt a design more directly inspired by these intertitles but I found it both too plain and too Gothic.
Along similar lines I also tried an idea based on my film’s titles, but I wasn’t so fond on the result.
I experimented with keeping the drawing to the back of the card while the front would be simpler, but I decided I wanted a QR code to link to my portfolio which the cat would be in the way of.
From all these ideas and my CV’s design, this is what I ended up with:
I think this combines and expands upon the design language of my CV well, while retaining the vintage and minimalist inspiration in a lot of my concepts.
PS: I chose not to get specific with a particular role on my business card or CV, just using ‘Artist-Illustrator-Designer’ on the former. This is because I find myself unsure of what position in particular I’d like to pursue. What’s more because of my lack of work experience I would find difficulty in trying to tailor my CV to any one part of a pipeline. This will change in future, however, and in time I will have several CVs made for application to different roles.