Our quick tips to perfect CVs, Portfolios and Cover Letters

In collaboration with our community outreach partners, Fuse Manchester, we’ve written tips and helpful hints when it comes to doing your creative resumes and portfolios!

In the past we’ve shared opportunities, in the hope that our network can find that next big thing. For others, we’ve given advice and continued to support communities with our resource hub. Make sure to check it out and see if there’s any opportunities coming up.

If you’re just at the beginning stages of creating your resumes, we recommend trying out Canva and their extensive list of templates. Canva is a free-to-use website with drag and drop features, to digitally design anything.

Their list of templates can be found here.

CVs: Dos and Don'ts

Make sure there’s no typos. Within Adobe applications like InDesign, Illustrator and Photoshop, there is a spellcheck feature usually found under Edit > spelling. Alternatively, use Google Docs!

Add personality. whether it’s through what you’ve written or visually, it’ll help differentiate other applicants from yourself. (Tip: keep it consistent through both the CV and portfolio, if you’re adding your personal brand visually).

Bullet point your experience section, instead of writing a paragraph. It makes it easier to read and highlights the main parts. Whoever may be looking at your application, will have 100s of other ones to look through and likely won’t have the time to read through several paragraphs.

Include self-initiated projects within your experience section and explain what you learnt while making it! It highlights your passion for the work you do and ambition to create work outside of employment.

Always include your hobbies. What do you do outside of the creative industry?

Include your professional social media handles and/or website. (Tip: Double check it works if they’re hyperlinked!)

Try to keep it to one page, if possible. At most, keep it at two pages max.

Don’t add any skill bars! Despite your knowledge in creative applications, if you fill the bar up it seems like you know every single feature, keybind and usage when in reality, industry professionals still find new features every other day.

Don’t overcomplicate it. By this we’re saying not to make it too text-heavy or hard to read. A simple layout works much better.

Don’t submit your CV if the file’s any bigger than 3mb. Make sure it’s as small as it can be, but still good enough in quality.

If you’re adding an image of yourself, don’t make it huge enough to take a lot of space.

Portfolios: Dos and Don’ts

Include an introductory page with: your email, phone number, social media handles and a few words about you.

Include around 4-6 projects and keep your portfolio to the lowest amount of pages possible! Again, this will help maximise how much your portfolio will be looked through, in a short amount of time. 

Include self-initiated work. Make sure there’s a good balance of commercial and non-commercial work if you have worked on those projects in the past.

For each project and case study, add a title page and the disciplines it falls within. (e.g. Graphic Design, Art Direction) with a couple of words about the project and your thoughts. At most, keep it to a paragraph. For the remaining pages, images only - think of it like a film trailer, show the best bits with the fewest amount of words possible.

Say thank you at the end!

If most of your work falls within a physical format, see if you can submit a physical portfolio instead!

Don’t submit anything above 10mb. Usually, agencies and companies will only accept files that are 10mb and under. If your file is too large, try websites like ilovepdf.com and smallpdf.com to compress the file and retain quality. (For anyone including animated GIFs or Video, that may be what’s making your file size larger than it should be. Include a link to the video using Youtube, Vimeo or Google Drive!)

Don’t go over 25 pages!

Include work that you love and want to do in the future. It’s a struggle to decide which projects to showcase so number each project from first to last based on how much you enjoyed it, it can help you pick what to include.

Cover Letters: Dos and Don’ts

Visually, keep it consistent with your cv and portfolio and your own personal branding

A good structure to keep when writing a cover letter is to firstly, mention who you are and secondly, write about why you’d be perfect for the role. state relevant experiences and past work.

Don’t simply address it to a ‘sir’ or ‘madam’, always try and find someone who works at the company and address them directly. use websites like Linkedin to find company info!

Keep it brief. it needs to grab someone’s attention so don’t go overboard with the writing.

Write in first person, add some personality and don’t be afraid to add some humour.

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