Fonts?
Like 12 point? or 10.5? Or Italic?
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It’s taken six MONTHS for my job application process, and it’s still not finished yet. I’d like to beat them all to death with a shitty stick.
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I like the idea of a font that’s a compromise between serif and sans serif, but I never have a use for it.
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I use layered combinations of Foundry Plek and Flek, over erotic photos of myself blown-up in halftone dots.
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Surprise! Helvetica is now out.
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Are you applying for a job at Wired in 1993?
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I am not really “applying for jobs” with these, they are merely ways I propagate information to random companies. But, yes. Sometimes.
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At least aspire to Emigré!
(ETA, only semi on-topic: David Carson once set an entire Ray Gun interview with Bryan Ferry in Zapf Dingbats because he didn’t like the article.)
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Ick.
I think this LaTeX code will get you the right style for a job where one would actually want to work. However, for the desperate \usepackage{arev} is probably safer than mathpazo.
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If you start from the assumption that there are clearly wrong typefaces to use (along with established design elements), then the logical conclusion is that some choices are better than others.
Perhaps “wonks” aren’t the last word in quantitative analysis, though.
Courier: “You don’t have a typewriter, so don’t try to pretend that you have a typewriter”
What if I have a typewriter, is Courier appropriate then?
Not for nothing, but I used a DEC VT font on a resume for a VAX-related consulting gig and got the job.
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A few times I’ve tried to use LyX with some LaTeX resume templates, but I’ve had trouble getting it to work. I suppose that before I can impress anyone with my skills, I have to actually acquire the skills.
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In my experience HR people are pretty worthless. I think of them as the sort of people who did well in college because they’re really good at following rules and got into HR because they really enjoy judging people.
I like Trebuchet, but I don’t think I’ve ever gotten a job where I’ve submitted a resume.
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What’s wrong with Palatino?
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Kind of hard for a font name to be better than Optima…
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I’d like the kind of job where you can submit your resume using a trebuchet…
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I use whatever format the HR department or recruiter or whoever says they want. If that’s Microsoft Word, they’ll get a Microsoft Word version, using default fonts that are guaranteed to be available in their copy of Word and supported on their printer, which also increases the chances that it’ll look ok instead of getting munged into a mess of line-breaks, widows, and orphans.
The original, though? ASCII with line breaks / letting the font default to the reader’s browser’s / email client’s default font. If the HR person or hiring manager uses reading glasses, I don’t want to mess with that, and if (as $DAYJOB’s HR department seems to have done when we last hired somebody) the HR department is feeding the resumes through some ugly standard-format-transmogrifier, any additional formatting I put in at the beginning is likely to mess up the output.
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heh… that’s a pretty niche nitpick dude. Sadly the tyranny of the default means that for most intents and purposes, what should be referred to as ‘typefaces’ are now almost universally known as ‘fonts’.
My 2c as a self-appointed typography wonk and someone who does graphics for teh moneys: Fuck these idiots. Obviously your CV (or resumé for you dirty, French-loving Americans) is a representation of you - but as with anything it’s a matter of ‘you can’t judge a book by its cover’. If an HR person decides to not read someone’s CV because it’s submitted in Times then they aren’t a professional HR person.
That being said, think about your audience. If you are a designer then you sure as hell should be able to make a CV that doesn’t look like butt. If you aren’t a designer then don’t worry: it literally doesn’t matter if you use helvetica or arial since 99% of people cannot differentiate between the two.
So… Which of the above is Arial and which is Helvetica?
My helpful tips would be: go to www.fontsquirrel.com and choose a free commercial use font you like (all of them on that site are legit free for commercial use). Another option is to copy the professionals. This site gives examples of typefaces used in popular publications:
http://fontsinuse.com/in/1/industries/24/fashion-apparel
My final tip would be to just get your hands on a good CV layout online. There are a ton of them out there and most of them have already been thoughtfully laid-out with attractive colour schemes and appropriate design. You can buy them online at various places or you can find them on gfx exchange websites for illegal download. Since no one but an HR department is going to see your CV go nuts and steal fonts/layouts to your heart’s content.
If it wasn’t obvious yet that you shouldn’t take CV tips from bloomberg, this should’ve made that clear:
Firstly: being original is generally good, so plus points there (though they confuse the reader by suggesting it, then ambiguously mocking their own suggestion with the ‘maybe’ bit)
Secondly: Choosing a glyph from a set that anyone can easily use as your personal logo is about as far from original as you can get.
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Pedantry on your pedantry: a font is not (necessarily) a typeface plus size plus weight plus whatever. It is a physical or digital implementation of a typeface: so, a set of metal sorts for olde style printing presses, or something like LinLibertine_R.otf on a computer. In the latter case, size is not an integral feature of the font.
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Um, no…
