LISTS :: 100 RESUME MISTAKES

1. Shadow text behind name

2. Name in homebrew, "quill-drawn" Evanescence-era handwriting font

3. Initials/monogram as logo

4. Meaningless squiggle or set of squares as your logo

5. Too many fonts

6. Times New Roman (in a design resume)

7. Bad tracking

8. Arial/Helvetica (again, in a design resume)

9. Lo-res "optimized" images embedded in pdf

10. Forgetting to change file properties from "awesome_resume.indd"

11. Colors. Oh so many colors.

12. Too many lines

13. Bad indentation; no gutters; no layout

14. Looks like it was created in Word; uses same indentation structure as Word

15. "Clever" initial as logo, like the intertwined STL on Cardinals hats

16. Two lines crossing at the corner and extending out—looks contrived

17. Bad line weight

18. More than one page

19. Including your birth date?! (on a U.S. resume)

20. Misspellings, extra spaces

21. Wingdings

22. Overdesigned; loads slow; too many graphics; someone just bought Photoshop

23. Lines placed seemingly at random

24. The awful background watermark

25. Lo-res inline thumbnail of your awful artwork

26. Tiny fonts

27. Huge, honkin' fonts

28. Mix-and-match serif fonts

29. Poor leading

30. Flower-print "stationery" or "scrapbook" background

31. Any colored or dark background

32. The clever "flow-chart" resume

33. Any headers or subheads in italics—almost always looks bad

34. Font sizes for top header bear no relationship to font sizes for the rest

35. Beginning all your job descriptions with, "Worked to..."

36. The dreaded double line—just because it exists doesn't mean it goes in the resume

37. Awkward negative-space, everything-highlighted-in-gray-but-headers look

38. Use of the too-wide "Black" variant of a font for your headers

39. Name sideways in an awful, colorful, pixellated font

40. Layers; drop shadows; fancy gradients—save it for the portfolio, if at all

41. Microfonts

42. Anything that makes the layout look offset/off balance/wrong

43. Tables with borders

44. Use of underlined or strike-thru fonts or sandwiching headers between lines

45. The random squiggle as design tool—experiment elsewhere

46. Navy blue and black—you wouldn't wear it, don't send it

47. Width of clever line extension of a letter in your name doesn't match up with the font

48. Looks like sports team press release

49. Not centering header text on its background swatch

50. The "career objective" line—"...to secure a position as a..."—no one cares

51. Inline, embedded copies of logos you've created for clients

52. Your own awful logo

53. Headers inside vector circles: Wowzers, you dragged a cursor to create a shape!

54. Dividing lines made of plus signs, intermittent dots, etc. Again, just because you can...

55. Colors you wouldn't use to decorate your own home: evergreen, puce, peanut...

56. Page corners bracketed by random pixellated swirls you "created" in Illustrator

55. Fonts all the same weight, no bolds

56. Tilted text, anything else that shows how XTREME*~! you are

57. "Clever" wingding variants you downloaded from a free font site

58. Big header at the top says "RESUME" (and in italics, too) instead of "YOUR NAME"

59. Use of columns to cram in way too much crap

60. Borderline cliched: the "text ramping outward along a slope, I can use InDesign" resume

61. The cliched blog-template "typography" brackets or paragraph markers

62. Difference between capital and lowercase letters artificially exaggerated

63. Cover letter, resume and portfolio all in one massive, 5 MB document

64. "This resume created in Adobe InDesign, using blah blah, blah..." Best viewed in Internet Explorer, eh?

65. Large areas of resume covered in black background, still wet hour after printing

66. Whispy quill pen graphic in the header. No, no, no, no, no.

67. Playskool plastic blue

68. Every single font pixellated, suggesting a default viewing size problem

69. Difference in font size between first and last name

70. "Typewriter" fonts—because you're a WRITER, get it?

71. Some stuff right-aligned, some stuff left-aligned, font sizes all over the place

72. Apple logo glyphs—because you're familiar with Macs, get it?

73. Listing cliched industry websites you frequent as "extra credit"

74. Full-res graphics but compressed, pixellated fonts

75. Headers/logos "peeking out" from behind a line. Not clever.

76. Using a "trendy" Asian character as your logo when you're not Asian

77. starshine71198@yahoo.com, sparkels21@hotmail.com

78. Huge, inexplicable blocks of white space at top of resume, header crunched to one side

79. A resume designed to be folded like a brochure, if only it had even sections and gutters

80. Including second page, ostensibly designed to be printed on back of resume, in online version

81. "To Whom It May Concern, ..."

82. "Watercolor splash" background image with a drop shadow—wtf?!

83. "References available upon request."

84. Resume called "My freelance resume.indd"—Whose? Do I know you?

85. "I enjoy helping to solve design problems and..."

86. The capitalization of random Nouns

87. Overlapping first and last name—not clever

88. That little useless header with your set of one-word themes: Graphics. Web. Design. Print. [whispers] Wow...

89. A JPEG of your signature. Anywhere.

90. All italics—are you kidding me?

91. A 3D "pill" blob under your name, like a cheap late-'90s Web menu from awesomemenus.com

92. Improperly exporting your resume to PDF, leaving white spaces, artifacts around borders

93. Larger than about 100 KB

94. RESUME in huge shadow letters behind main text—looks like VOID on a bad check

95. Calling your resume "Professional Resume"—as opposed to your drinking resume, right?

96. "Resume" with an accent only on one of the Es, rather than both or none

97. A border of any sort

98. Subheads larger than headers

99. Use of rounded boxes that don't line up—why the hell does no one use guides?

100. A cutesy Twitter-esque vector-birdie logo: You are not Chuck Palahniuk's jacket cover designer



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