Resumes and RWD: Content, content, content

ho knew I was doing it all wrong? Throughout my working life, my resume has been horrendously unattractive, difficult to scan, uninteresting, bland, and generally makes me wonder how I've gotten as many interviews as I have. Well, no more! I recently stumbled across a couple of graphic designers' resumes and realized that a resume doesn't have to be a dry, formulaic monstrosity (mine was also much too long, a sure indicator of my lack of experience). In my own defense, I had put that resume together while working and looking at jobs in the federal government, which is really not known for being terribly stylish. But that's just an excuse.

In reading back over some previous versions of my resume (pre-Git infestation in my life, so piles of old files), I noticed that not only had I dropped some minor positions from the tail-end, but I had also lost interesting tidbits like the list of gallery shows my artwork had been displayed in. I'm not currently looking for work as a photographer, but those shows were something I was proud of and had worked hard on. Could they be considered work experience, or just an example of well-roundedness? Is character an asset better addressed in a cover-letter and/or interview?

Somewhere not too long ago I made a mental note that it was possible to write a resume in HTML, rather than the old word processor approach. Then my brain did its thing and a dim little bulb lit up; an HTML resume is a great way to show off the fact that I can create a bit of content and do some basic styling. Plus, it would get me away from the headache of nudging paragraphs and headings around in Google Drive. Complete control! mwaha– ...I've been saying that too much in these posts lately. oops.

Here's where I went slightly astray: doing a bit of background research on HTML resumes. I only meant to find a couple examples (see my collection here), but somewhere along the way ran into A List Apart (ALA)'s article on responsive resumes. Which is when I realized I had seen a retweet of this article on responsive web design (RWD) earlier in the day. Which took me back to another article from ALA on fluid layouts, flexible images, and media queries (RWD in a nutshell), further explained with handy percentage-based grid templates and some guidance on element sizing for those of us who just don't grok maths.

Somewhere in there, the best explanation for the whole business of RWD was from Mark Boulton. Instead of designing for a computer screen, an iphone, or even a printed page, designers should think in the opposite direction: from the content outwards. Start with the content, lay it out in relative terms (ems and %s), think of the whole as a fluid form originating from a single element. Design outwards from the logo, from a critical ad for your store, from a dynamically generated element like a blog post. Like all logical things, this makes perfect sense once you've heard it.

"Start designing from the content out" also makes sense in the context of "content first, then style." You can't style something that doesn't exist, and it's much more difficult to stuff your content into arbitrarily created elements. So step one is to create or define your content, step two is to style it in relative terms. A resume is also a prime place to avoid contentless content and to make sure that you are getting the right information to the user (your future employer). So to review, the most important things in design are content, content, content.

Whew, well that was sort of step one in the process. Coming up next should be editing the old resume into a more manageable sound bite, then designing a new layout before looking too closely at inspiration. That way I can get raw me onto the page before introducing outside forces.

Career realization orchestration

oday I went on a whirlwind tour of small web design firms in the DC area... via their websites. I'm not entirely certain where I'll wind up working next, but I wanted to get an idea of the playing field, who does what, who has which skills and so on. A quick Google search netted me about a dozen firms to browse through, cross-referenced to some Yelp reviews and Angie's List. I realized partway through that in the longterm I want to be working on a single project, e.g. for an organization developing and maintaining a service, product, brand or mission. However, until I'm at that stage, I do want to build or contribute to as many small things as I can to get more experience in a variety of languages, platforms, aspects, tools, ad infinitum.

Anywho. Between browsing all those design firm's sites and clicking any link with the word "design," I've been all over the place lately. My favorite sites are usually minimal, clean and simple, no clutter, a touch of flashy stuff (watch the "Silver and Light" video, this guy is great), hand-drawn elements, and a limited palette (though I might also go for lightly cluttered and slightly "hipster").

EDIT: I started an account on Bo.lt, but am not entirely impressed with the service. The idea is that they archive screenshots and entire copies of webpages, hence, good for a design inspiration collection. Adding pages can be glitchy, and it still doesn't have an easy "embed collection" sort of thing. Picasa (despite having irritatingly merged with G+) does support embedded slideshows, but generates an embeddable version itself. However, I'm not actually using Boltnet for its original intended purpose.

However, I ran across a lot of sites using carousels at the top of the page, and I have to say that was a big turn off. Knowing how popular they are, I'm pretty forgiving, but good lord. If I'm disinclined to actually look at a scrolling reel of content, I can't imagine that the average user will give it any thought. And a carousel is like the A1 photo; it takes up the majority of the space above the fold, which means that space is completely wasted if no one looks at it, much less clicks on the content flying past.

All of this has been discussed and debated quite a lot across the web. The general conclusions I found are that carousels stick around because you can sort of cram more content into a single space, and because they've become a staple. The problem with reading up on this is that while every design firm and marketing agency has done their own usability testing, that data is usually kept private.

The UX site on Stack Exchange has some discussion on the effectiveness of carousels, to wit, whether rotating content nets a site any conversion (meaning the user does what the marketer is hoping they'll do: convert from just browsing to being an active user or a paying customer). I can't remember how I found this article, but it's a good, recent roundup of tidbits on banner blindness, user control and contentless content. And from there I found Jakob Nielsen's denunciation of the autoforwarding carousel (though I was disappointed to find that the main example of user testing was literally user testing. One user.)

Anyone have a good way to collect inspiration online [that isn't Pinterest]?

What color is your flower?

few weeks ago a friend suggested that I fill out the "Flower exercise" from What Color Is Your Parachute? The exercise is designed to help you figure out what you're looking for in a career, and from what I can tell, it's also the core of Parachute (My copy is from something like 1980, and I haven't quite managed to read it). The book actually goes into quite a lot of detail on how to fill out the flower, but you can also just wing it based on the petal titles.

I know, it sounds a little hokey. I thought so too, especially since I thought I had a pretty good idea what I was looking for already, but I went with it. Turns out it's always helpful to get thoughts outside your head, whether to see all the facts in one place, leave reminders for yourself or generate new thoughts in the process. I don't want to make mine entirely public, but here are a few things I'm looking to do in my career:

• Make information widely available and easy to access. That could be something straightforward like library work, or structuring webpages so that users can find what they're looking for plus several things they weren't. It could even be backend support for projects with this as a goal, e.g. part of a multidisciplinary team.
• Help people become inspired to be self-motivated, informed learners who never just say "I don't know," but rather "Let's look it up."
• Provide information services through products that are viable, upgradeable, scaleable and generally future friendly. So, no silos, relative links, transferable data, that sort of thing. 

As for skills, I have profiles on Coursera and Codecademy that will give a bit of an idea what MOOCs I've been fiddling with, and this project should also make it pretty clear what I'm capable of (anything! mwahaha*ahem). Generally: HTML, CSS, JS, some SQL and PHP, WordPress, Photoshop, Lightroom, baking, gardening... 

The other petals include things like: I'd like to work in a sunny, friendly office, with bikeability, sensible benefits, and most importantly lots of opportunity for learning and inspiration from colleagues, classes, workshops, conferences. 

And continuing with the embedding problem, here are some snippets of Parachute from Google Books in an iframe: