Following on from having finalised my CV and decided on a template for future cover letters, I looked into creative CVs and how they could be an opportunity that I could possibly take advantage of. A creative CV is one that has been designed to showcase the designers abilities whilst also providing information of their skills, a creative CV could almost be a mini portfolio and regular CV in one. One guide that I found very interesting to read through was the Creative CV Guide by Jan Cole at the University of Nottingham, this guide provides all the necessary information to build up your best creative CV.
One of the biggest rules one has to follow when deciding to make a creative CV, is not letting the ‘medium interfere with the message’. In order to avoid this happening, you should decide on all you content before starting to decide how you want to layout the design. It is better that you have your information correct and decided for starting to avoid any important information being missed out by accident; the employer will look at your content more if they have asked for a CV rather than how it has been decorated. However, this is not always the case, there may be exceptions where a recruiter will look at your artwork and even though your qualifications are not up to the standard they wanted, your work is better than or exactly what they wanted, so they pick you solely based on the artwork they have seen on your creative CV alongside your portfolio.
There are some very nice creative CVs online and looking through them all, I have been inspired to look into creating my own for the future in case I want to send creative CVs to potential employers rather than a regular plain CV. However I need to remember that taking the risk could end either way, with interviews because of my innovative and different CV, in comparison to the rest of the CVs sent in or even just not looked at twice as if it was a regular CV because it was not what the employer wanted to see and did not want to go for that.
When thinking about what I would like to put on my own creative CV, I would look to showcase my range of illustrations for a more open application, where the recruiter has not specified what kind of style they would like to see. What could be tough is printing off different CVs for different jobs that I would be interested in; so putting my preferred art style to use on the front of the CV would show the style that I enjoy and feel most comfortable using. Creating small characters to sit around my information would work well for when I want to use the style I use most, and when I want to create a more generic CV with different art styles I can work in, I would use my better pieces that I have created over the years around the text. I think I would also prefer to keep the layout as similar to the traditional CV layout but would maybe like to experiment with different layouts and what would look best. Below are a few Illustrators creative CVs that I quite particularly liked the look of when doing my research.
Jam and the Ham 