Creative Resume Templates

How to Make Your Resume More Creative

As you write your resume, it’s important to ask yourself, “How can I make my resume stand out?” With a creative resume, the sky’s the limit on what design elements you can play with. There are several tried-and-true ideas to get you started. Here are a few of the possibilities to consider.

1. Color

You can use color in more whimsical ways on a creative resume than on traditional or modern ones. It’s OK to use bold, bright and multiple colors. Just make sure your document is still easy to read.

If the company you’re applying to has a corporate color scheme (check their logo, website or offices for ideas), you might want to reflect that in your design. This is a good way to subtly signal that you will fit into their work environment well.

2. Graphics

A creative resume might contain symbols or graphics that are related to your industry. You can use a different icon for each section, or have a single graphic related to your field featured prominently on your resume.

No matter what graphic you choose, make sure that it’s high-quality and fits with the content of your resume. Several of our creative resume templates below have excellent built-in graphics.

3. Professional Photo

Maybe you’re applying to work for a quirky local business where personality is a bonus. Or maybe your field is direct sales or marketing, where you’ll be interacting face-to-face and forming business relationships with new clients.

In any field where your personality or professional appearance is a key component of the job, a photo is a good way to show that. Including a professional photo of yourself can be a great addition to a creative resume.

Make sure your photo is professional. A silly, heavily edited or unconventional photo is a distraction. It doesn’t provide potential employers with helpful information about you and might hurt your chances of getting a job interview.

4. Unique Layout

Get creative with your own resume layout if it’s appropriate for the job to which you’re applying. What documents are relevant to your field, and how might you model your resume after them? For example, a resume that looks like a playbill might be a fun twist for a job at a theater. A resume that’s modeled after a popular social media site could work well for a social media marketing position.

Creative resumes can look like everything from movie posters to subway maps, especially if these playful designs relate to your desired job. You can use designs like these as inspiration, but remember not to copy them exactly. Borrow your favorite elements and use them to create your own resume template, or adapt one of our templates to make your own appealing resume.

Alternate Forms of Creative Resumes

There are additional, innovative ways to present yourself that could help you make a bold impression on a potential employer beyond the traditional text-based resumes you found above. We’re living and looking for jobs in an increasingly online world, and there are new online resume formats that can showcase your professional achievements.

Although we encourage you to experiment with these types of resume, you shouldn’t see them as replacements to a conventional one- or two-page resume. Since so many online job portals ask for resumes in text-based file formats like .DOCX or .PDF, you should view these alternate forms of creative resumes as supplemental materials that lend strength to your resume and showcase your coding, web design or creative skills.

Online Resumes

With the popular rise of career-oriented social media platforms like LinkedIn, Glassdoor and Monster along with user-friendly hosting sites like Squarespace and Wix, it’s become increasingly easier to put your resume online. These sites are helpful and give you the freedom to delve into greater detail about the various tasks, responsibilities and accomplishments that you experienced during your entire professional life.

Unlike traditional resumes, which are limited to one or two pages, these websites allow you to expand on your professional accomplishments. Since you should see this online resume as a supplementary tool to a standard resume, you can also play with the format and talk about your achievements through alternative styles like photographs, illustrations, graphs or timelines. We love these online resume examples found by The Muse’s career experts.

Video Resume

As we just mentioned, some people may make a creative resume in an online format. Some job seekers have created resumes using the presentation software Prezi, PowerPoint or Google Slides. Others have made short videos that tell the story of their achievements and work experience. Several websites exist specifically to help you make an attractive visual resume.

These can be viewed online or saved as an image to send to potential employers. An online resume is a bit unconventional and best for creative fields. If you think an online or video resume will help you stand out from the competition, go for it — just make sure you have a paper version handy, too.

Infographic Resumes

The infographic resume uses a visual format to provide information about you and your experience. It might include a graph, a pie chart or another visual way of presenting this information. Or, the entire resume might be modeled as an infographic.

Creating a good infographic resume from scratch can be difficult and time-consuming. There’s more to it than just making a simple table or chart. Instead of doing it all on your own, check out our infographic resume guide and templates to make the job easy for you.

Portfolio Resumes

Portfolio resumes are the trickiest creative format to pull off, but a successful attempt can help you demonstrate your work experience with practical examples of your work. These templates include spaces for you to put copies of your major projects such as art exhibits, photography, designed websites, advertising campaigns, or data analysis projects.

We have a library of free portfolio templates and additional writing tips, but we strongly advise that you exercise restraint when choosing which work samples to include on your resume. You don’t want to overwhelm your document with multiple samples –– this can easily break the flow of your resume and make it unappealing to hiring managers. Choose one or two samples to pique the manager’s interest and direct them to a dedicated portfolio download or website that shows your full range.

Creative Resume FAQ

Do resume templates matter?

This depends on your needs. Downloading a resume template isn’t a mandatory step when you’re writing a resume. Your focus should be on crafting a resume that directly ties your work experience to the requirements of an open job. However, the ease of submitting your resume to an online job posting means that hiring managers can see as many as 200 resumes for a single job opening. Here’s where a resume template could matter — a unique design could help you stand out against a sea of simple or basic resumes.

Should my resume look pretty?

Absolutely! A recent study of recruiters indicated that your resume has seven seconds to convince a hiring manager to either dismiss or keep reading your resume. A well-designed and well-formatted resume with bold use of creative elements is crucial in appealing to a hiring manager. We previously mentioned some steps you can take to make your resume look good, but we’ll briefly summarize them here.

• Clear margins: We recommend using standard 1-inch margins on your resume. We know limiting your resume to one page can make it tempting to use smaller margins in order to fit more information in, but there’s a reason academic papers require generous margins. Your eyes need a visual break between blocks of texts in order to properly absorb the information. Small margins and dense resume sections can actually hurt how well your resume performs.
• Readable fonts: This ties into helping the hiring manager’s eyes absorb your professional experience. Use a simple and familiar font like Times New Roman, Arial or Helvetica in size 10-12 on your resume. Any smaller and you risk a hiring manager squinting or giving up on your resume. Any bigger, and you lose valuable space to impress the hiring manager.
• Color: Most word processing programs use a default black and white layout. There’s nothing wrong with submitting a resume in black and white, but if you’re applying for a highly desired job, it’s easy for your document to get lost in the sea of similar formats. Adding pops of color can help your resume stand out. We advise that you use the entry-level rule of color theory and only use three to five colors on your document. Remember, the white of your margins and black of your text count as colors.
• Borders: Your margins and paragraph breaks can indicate when and where a resume section starts and ends, but you can add additional clues in the form of borders. These small markers can send visual cues to the hiring manager that make it a lot easier for them to scan your resume.

Do employers like creative resumes?

Whether or not an employer likes your creative resume really does depend on the job. You should use a creative resume if you work in a creative industry like tech, advertising, marketing, customer service, childcare or education.

You can also use deductive reasoning when you research the job opening. Is there a use of humor on the job posting? Does the company website emphasize employee activities and company culture? Is their social media peppered with playful posts? If so, you can safely assume these employers might appreciate a creative resume.

If you’re not sure, we highly recommend that you use one of our alternate resumes:

• Basic: These designs are anything but basic. These elegant templates build on a standard layout and add subtle design elements that can help you out. Although these designs are suited for job seekers in any industry, they are the perfect introduction resume for entry-level employees, recent graduates, interns and job seekers who are reentering the workforce.
• Contemporary: Our bold take on a stand resume, these templates lean into a multi-column approach and use of section borders to make your skills, experience and education stand out. These layouts are perfectly suited for applicants in law, finance, banking, or any traditional industry where you want to demonstrate skill aptitude.
• Simple:This is our play on the free resume templates you usually find on your word processing program. These clean and simple templates help you elevate your resume through the combination of thoughtful font choices, crisp margins, and special header treatment on each of your resume sections. These are perfect for any job seeker, regardless of experience or field of interest.