Graphic designer resume examples from 2025

How To Write A Graphic Designer Resume

Graphic design has become a very competitive field, and getting a job can come down to how impressive your resume is. That’s right, knowing how to create a standout graphic designer resume is more important than ever, and the following information can help you nail it.

Key Takeaways

• Graphic design is a competitive field and having a good resume is more important than ever.

• Your website or digital portfolio is an important element of a successful resume.

• Your resume needs to display your graphic skills but should remain a professional document rather than an overdone work of art.

• Include a resume summary that hits your soft skills as well as your achievements in a rapid and succinct manner.

What Should be Included in a Graphic Designer Resume

Collecting information on how to write a resume can help you, especially when you find this task difficult. But more important than generic information is learning what specifically should be included in a graphic designer’s resume. You want to have your resume catch attention and showcase your specific skills. To do this, make sure to include the following:

• Contact information. Oddly, many people leave this off of their resume as an oversight but having your contact information available is crucial. What’s changed is that a physical address is no longer necessary – no one is going to mail you something. Today an email address and a phone number are essential.

• Website/portfolio. A great graphic artist has a portfolio of examples that they want to display, or they use a website to show off their work. This has become normal, and to be competitive, you’re going to need to include a link to your work.

• Education. Listing your education and credentials is just as important for a graphic designer as it is for anyone else in the business world. We know what you do is an art, but employers still want to know that you’ve learned the basic tools of the trade.

• Skills and program proficiencies. There are different skills and different programs in the field of graphic design. As part of your education and job experiences, you’ve no doubt learned several different programs and have mastered some skills. This is where you get to show off your knowledge and spotlight your talent.

• Awards and recognitions. If you’ve received awards and recognition for any of your work, make sure to mention it. Even being nominated matters, so add that to your resume.

• Job experience. List your job in reverse chronological order, with the most recent listed at the top. A job description or a list of your duties is traditional, but today’s hiring managers want to briefly skim your resume, so bullet points get more attention than full paragraphs.

• Summary statement. Adding a summary statement to your graphic design resume is a great way to give hiring managers a glimpse into who you are, where you’ve been professionally, and where you want to go. More on this later.

Skills to List on a Graphic Designer Resume

One thing that’s important in your resume is hitting the key skills for a graphic designer. There are some soft skills and some hard skills that hiring managers want to see. Hard skills are those you learn in school, and they can be taught. Soft skills are harder to define, and they tend to be character traits rather than learned skills.

The most common hard skills employers want from graphic designers are:

• Experience in certain programs. Illustrator, InDesign, Acrobat, and Photoshop tend to lead the list of programs that employers want people to know. If you have experience in these programs, then be sure to include it somewhere in your resume.

• CSS and HTML. Both computer languages are important to a graphic designer, and your experience level in each should be mentioned, especially if you’re an expert in either.

• Artistic abilities. Having the ability to freehand draw and sketch can play a big role in the job you want, and it’s a skill that can be learned, but there’s also a lot of natural talent involved.

The top soft skills for graphic designers are:

• Time management. Most graphic designers work under deadlines so being able to manage time and hit those deadlines is critical for many employers. This is difficult to work into a resume, but it will be a point in your favor if you can.

• Multitasking. Expect to have many different jobs happening at the same time as a graphic designer. If you’ve multitasked before, this will definitely be an advantage.

• Flexibility. This is a big part of both multitasking and time management and plays into other parts of a graphic design career on a regular basis.

Five Key Resume Tips for Writing a Graphic Designer Resume

• Use your skills. Your resume should look better than most of them; after all, graphic art is your thing. Just don’t get carried away.

  Not a lot of graphic art is required for business correspondence, and that’s what a resume is. This means that you should use your skills to make your resume look good but don’t get too carried away; it’s still all about the content.

• Tailor the resume. The good news is more people in graphic design have an idea of what type of work they want to do and where their talents lie, so go ahead and use that to craft a resume. You want to shine as the best option in that arena.

• Focus on your website or portfolio. You usually won’t send samples of your work with your resume, but you will include a link to your portfolio or your website. That means that you need to polish these samples until they shine. This is where your work speaks for you, and it’s just as, if not more important than your resume.

• Ask for help. Graphic art is often about the impression it creates or the reaction it gets from others; use that to your advantage. Get the impressions your friends and family have of your resume and use them to make it even better. Don’t forget to have someone proofread it, too; you never want a typo or a grammatical error on a resume.

• Spotlight achievements. You will be including any awards and recognition you’ve received, but you also want to call out achievements.

  Maybe you’ve hit deadlines consistently, or you’ve worked with a team to earn a huge client’s business, you have trained others on new programs, etc. Anything that you consider an achievement professionally can make you a standout job candidate.

Example Graphic Designer Resume Summary Statement

One important part of a resume is the summary statement. This is a short-but-sweet paragraph that gives you an opportunity to highlight some soft skills. Soft skills can be just as important to your success in a job as your technical training and proficiency in design programs. These skills include critical thinking, leadership, communication, and flexibility.

Try to craft a summary statement like the one below that uses hard and soft skills and speaks specifically to your professional aspirations.