Graphic designers create customer-focused designs, frequently working on projects like websites, games, product packaging, and advertising campaigns. Most graphic design work is based around marketing and visual branding, but employment opportunities can include everything from creating logos for multinational corporations to working with local governments and schools.
As a graphic designer, you’ll work account managers and creative directors to create a brief, develop concepts, and finalize a design that meets the client’s objectives. You’ll need excellent time management, the ability to collaborate well and work under pressure, and of course a hefty dose of creativity. Traditionally, graphic designer jobs ask for an undergraduate graphic design degree, but recent trends have seen the industry move away from requiring formal qualifications and toward online short courses. Either way, you’ll need hard skills with a variety of design software including Acrobat, Dreamweaver, Illustrator, and InDesign, along with an impressive portfolio to showcase your skills.
As a graphic designer, you’ll be working closely with clients to develop their brands and ensure the success of their advertising and marketing campaigns. Put your best foot forward with a resume that emphasizes your hard skills, proficiency with graphic design software, and experience contributing to the success of client projects.
Structuring your bullet points to lead with strong action verbs like “conceptualized,” “designed,” and “developed” emphasizes your role in the projects you’ve worked on. By focusing on accomplishments rather than simply listing job duties, you’re telling potential employers what they want to know and highlighting the skills you’ll need on the job.
You don’t need a long list of skills to impress a recruiter — in fact, the more concise you can be, the better. Keep your list of skills down to the ones most relevant for a graphic designer role, like design software, advertising, social media, and branding.
Landing a role as a junior graphic designer isn’t as hard as you might think. Most employers are looking for graphic design ability — as evidenced by your portfolio and qualifications — over extensive experience, which means emphasizing your hard skills and any relevant educational background. If you’re a recent graduate, don’t forget about university projects and internships, which can go a long way toward making up for minimal work experience.
As a recent graduate — or even if you’re a few years out and still applying for junior roles — your education section is a lot more important than it is for someone with more experience. You can use your education section to your advantage by listing any awards you’ve won, professional memberships, or specific qualifications that stress hard graphic design skills.
If you’re applying for an entry-level graphic design role, don’t worry if you don’t have a lot of experience. You can list any internships in the same way as you would regular work experience, using action verbs to emphasize what you accomplished. If you’ve completed any relevant university projects, make sure you highlight those, too.
As a senior graphic designer or graphic design director, you’ll be taking on high-level responsibilities and overseeing an entire department. Your resume needs to show significant experience as a graphic designer, as well as the capacity to lead a team to success. Make sure you’re emphasizing past leadership roles you’ve held as well as a commitment to ensuring the overall success of a company.
If you want to land a senior role, you’ll need to show a steady pattern of career growth. If you’ve landed a promotion that represents a significant increase in responsibilities, you can list the positions separately under the same company heading. If the job title alone doesn’t make it clear that this was a promotion, your bullet points will.
It’s always a good idea to use the exact title of the job you’re applying for on your resume. If you’ve held a position with the same responsibilities but under a different name, or if the titles are often used interchangeably, you can list both job titles at the start of your resume.
Graphic design managers have to juggle a lot of different roles. As well as the usual design skills, you’ll need an ability to manage a team, develop strategies, work collaboratively with other departments, and evaluate the performance of other employees. To land the role, make sure your resume reflects soft skills like leadership and conflict management on top of your graphic design experience.
When it comes to listing your achievement in bullet points, the more specific you can be, the better. If you’ve led a team, mention how many people were on it. Explain exactly how many projects you’ve created, what type of graphic design work you’ve done, and the concrete impact that had on your company’s success.
To lead a team, you’ll need a lot of soft skills as well as hard skills. The best way to emphasize these is through your accomplishments. Mentioning the size of the teams you’ve worked with shows your leadership and teamwork skills, while creating social media strategies, marketing content, or publications is a great way to highlight communication skills.
Freelance graphic designers work on the same kinds of projects as any other graphic designer, but as self-employed contractors. If you’re looking to pick up more freelance work, or to transition from freelance to regular employment, you’ll need a resume that emphasizes your ability to take initiative, work to a deadline, and understand your clients’ needs.
If you’ve been freelancing for a while, it might make sense to structure your work experience section according to different projects rather than clients. This lets you highlight your most impressive accomplishments in a way that is easy to follow and is clear about your specific role and achievements.
Not all employers fully understand the nature of freelance work, so the more specific you can be about your accomplishments, the better. Listing the number of projects, designs, and proposals you completed makes it clear how you were spending your time and helps emphasize soft skills like time management and work ethic.
The role of a creative designer can be broader than just graphic design. Creative designers need an excellent understanding of branding, marketing, and social media as well as proficiency with graphic design software. To land a role as a creative graphic designer, make sure your resume highlights your understanding of brand awareness and experience guiding products through the entire creative process.
Tailoring your resume to the exact job you’re applying for doesn’t have to take a lot of time or effort. Including job-specific keywords in your resume title and skills section are two of the easiest ways to target your resume. Make sure you’re including keywords like product design, social media marketing, and specific graphic design programs that ATS are likely to scan for.
Including a resume summary is a great way of tailoring your resume and providing additional information about your background and accomplishments. They’re especially useful for career changers or people without a lot of experience in graphic design, but can be used to great effect to highlight your particular strengths and contextualize the achievements in your bullet points.
Unsurprisingly, the most important hard skills for graphic designers are design software skills. Developing proficiency with a few key design programs — whether that’s self-taught or through formal qualifications — is essential to landing a role as a graphic designer. Make sure to list these skills somewhere in your resume, either in your bullet points or a separate skills section, to bypass any Applicant Tracking Systems and impress recruiters.
The exact skills you need may depend on the exact job you’re applying for, so always read the job description thoroughly to find out which skills are the most important and tailor your resume accordingly. Our Targeted Resume tool will point out any important skills or keywords you’re missing and give you personalized advice on how to improve your resume.
This word cloud highlights the important keywords that appear on Graphic Designer job descriptions and resumes. The bigger the word, the more frequently it appears on job postings, and the more 'important' it is.
Graphic designers need to be able to conceptualize visuals, create compelling and on-brand designs, and present their ideas to clients. Use action verbs in your resume to highlight those skills — for example, using Illustrated or Fashioned shows your ability to create and finalize a design, while Revitalized and Customized demonstrate an awareness of branding and client needs.
Always structure your work experience bullet points with the action verb first. This puts the emphasis on what you actually accomplished, rather than simply listing job duties. For even more ideas to kickstart your graphic designer resume, check out our full list of resume action verbs.
For a full list of effective resume action verbs, visit Resume Action Verbs.
You should use bullet points to describe your achievements in your Graphic Designer resume. Here are sample bullet points to help you get started:
Revamped website flows and navigation menus, reducing the frequency of misdirected customer service queries by 30% and increasing traffic to previously neglected pages
Designed and launched customer feedback systems for Selfridges, improving net promoter score by 30 points in pilot teams over 6 months
Identified and mapped all manual process flows for current system to formulate logic and design for the new automated system
Re-designed website and developed social media marketing plan; increased total membership by 28% and social media followers by 17%
Led full redesign of website with findings from customer segmentation and competitive research, increasing website leads by 200%
For more sample bullet points and details on how to write effective bullet points, see our articles on resume bullet points, how to quantify your resume and resume accomplishments.
