Sketchy resume design

he most important thing to me right now is keeping my perspective. If my goals aren't in clear sight, I get massive scope creep and wind up trying to learn Unix instead of just working on my HTML project (see hereabouts). However, at this stage it's also important for me to be exploring, dabbling, learning everything I can, and even when projects don't work out or seem unreasonable in some way, I do still learn something from the experience.

Take the newfangled resume I created, for instance. It didn't come out quite as responsive as I hoped, largely because of some finicky elements and my avoidance of media breakpoints. What was interesting, however, was talking to a friend who is familiar with hiring processes at a very prominent tech company. He indicated that a good looking resume is nice and all, but what's most important is a) contact info and b) recent experience. The rest is just noise.

In all fairness, programmers are not necessarily interested in shmancy presentation and part of my goal was showing web design skills. However that was pretty irrelevant when I realized I didn't really want to host my resume publicly on my website.

The process was kind of interesting. I had a basic idea what I wanted to do, drew up some rough sketches (above) with actual pencil and paper (I can't handle initial sketching on a screen, sort of like how I just can't stand e-books. I'm a holdover, I know.) Then I entered my content in an HTML document, put it into sections and got the basic structure marked up. From there it was all about CSS, I barely touched the HTML document again except to add some id attributes. Below are some screencaps of the layout along the way, shown with boxes and dotted borders so I could keep track of what element was where. I admit I went a little crazy with the colors...

And yes, I blurred them, because the text isn't the point here. Some of my original ideas were even more abstract, but it became clear that I did need to say something about what skills came from which job. I considered doing this with some sort of clever mouseover thing, where a line from skill to experience would pop up, but decided that was definitely too fussy.

Anywho, one important question that came up in the process was how relative placement communicated relationship and meaning of each element. Elements next to each other would speak to each other in some way and have some relationship. I think I may just go back to my old, boring resume (though with less hideous layout, at least).

... After all that, I'm very done with this stage. Anyone have experience with designed v. functional resumes? Does a different layout affect your opinion of identical content?

EDIT: on structure, I leaned on the HTML outline concept, but didn't include this link here, I don't think.

Moving on, letting go

he hardest part of a project for me is deciding that it's finished. Usually it takes getting distracted by something new for me to really move on (this probably goes for some other stuff, too...) because otherwise I just can't let myself stop futzing, adjusting and perfecting. Translation: beating my head against something that just isn't making any more progress. So I have to learn to let it go, move forward.

In case you haven't been following along, in this case I'm referring to my "One Week Website" series of posts (clearly the timing didn't quite work out, but I never really expected it to). I started designing a new resume, and made great leaps of progress... until I ran into a wall attempting to make it perfectly responsive. This actually would have worked fine except that in keeping it super simple I was avoiding @media queries and pretty much everything except some basic CSS (see below).

And it was all going pretty well until I went to make a PDF. I have no idea how print formatting works, from web page to print dialog to PDF, but the margins didn't behave properly, it didn't fit on one page, and the white space looked weird instead of stylish (at least I hope the HTML version looks decent). So I reformatted a bit with those 800px min-widths on the #page-wrap and #content sections. Of course, now the #web and #general skills lists don't float and switch from side-by-side layout to being a single column, which means the 50% layout looks darn silly on mobile.

I tried using sections and header and h1-h6 instead of a flock of divs, and since this is a one use document, I just went with ids rather than classes. Feels wrong, though. At the very least, I have a resume that looks a little better than an old Word document, even if it isn't actually responsive. And! I did finally stop poking at it and just hit print.

body {font: normal 1em Times, serif;}
#page-wrap {width: 75%; margin: 5% auto; min-width: 800px;}
#me {display: inline-block; width: 100%; position: relative;}
#logoname {float: left; width: 25%; min-width: 165px;}
#logoname span span:first-of-type {color: #6C8771;}
#logoname span {color: #4D4D4D}
#contact {text-align: right; position: absolute; right: 0; bottom: 0;}
#content {width: 75%; float: right; min-width: 800px;}
#skills li {text-indent: -0.5em; padding-left: .5em;}
#web {float: left; width: 50%; clear: both;}
#general {float: left; width: 50%;}
#experience {clear: both;}
#learning li {display: inline; padding: 0 0.5em; border-left: 1px solid black;}
#learning li:last-child {border-right: 1px solid black;}

section {border-top: 1px solid black; padding-bottom: 20px;}
h1, h2, h3, h4, h5 {font-family: Baskerville, Palantino, serif; border-top: 1px solid black; margin: 0; padding: 0; display: inline-block; margin-bottom: 2%;}
h1 {font-size: 2em;}
h4 {float: left; font-size: 1.17em;}
h5 {padding-top: 3px;}
a {text-decoration: none; color: black;}
a:hover {color: gray;}
ul {list-style: none; padding:0; margin: 0;}
li {margin-bottom: 1%;}
dl {padding: 0; margin: 0;}
dt {padding-bottom: 1px;}
dd {padding-bottom: 1%;}

Now I just need to figure out if I really want to make my entire resume public on the internet. My feeling is no, not one bit, but then part of the point of doing it in HTML is lost. Still, it was fun to put together, and that's more important anyway.

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.

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: