Typography for Resumes

Read Practical Typography first. No seriously, read it.

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Recently, I’ve fallen madly in love with typography. My girlfriend gets upset whenever she catches me ogling at fonts again. My mom looked really disappointed in me after watching me agonize an entire day over two pieces of printed papers with slightly different line spacing. My tragedy as a software engineer is that I will never typeset anything other than Markdown files.

Design is powerful. When I see a beautiful design, it just floods my brain with a potent rush of dopamine and I can’t help but smile. Even the design of something as basic as a resume is no exception — and this Arabic typographer’s resume comes very close to my ideal. I showed it to professional typographers and one stated that the spacing in this resume was so perfect it made them “want to weep”. They understand me.

I have been channeling this passion into trying to craft a beautiful resume in order to justify the amount of time I’ve wasted obsessing over this, and I have developed some very strong opinions regarding resume design.

Why care?

If you have a preference for 2 spaces or 4 spaces when indenting code, you care about typography. Typography is all about arranging text to make it legible and appealing — and code is no exception. Such a minor difference in style dramatically changes readability and aesthetics without actually changing the code.

This idea also applies to other documents like resumes. Your resume will stand out as higher quality, and it will be easier and more enjoyable to read.

“Isn’t Jake’s Resume good enough?”

You can use Jake’s Resume, but so will the other 800+ applicants. Be a little more unique.

Recruiters (allegedly) only read your resume for a few seconds. You’re not doing yourself any favors by having an ugly resume. You want your resume to be as inviting to read as possible. I’ve seen resumes with 7pt text and awful, inconstistent spacing that hurt to look at. Instead, you want recruiters to think “damn, this resume looks so good I have to read the whole thing”.

1. Choose a better font

It’s often said that great designers can make even the most basic, overused fonts “sing”. Neither you nor I are great designers. Let’s use a good font as a crutch.

The job market has jaded so many workers that they have developed odd superstitions around the job application process. There is now this bizzare myth that you shouldn’t use any alternative font on your resume. The two primary justifications are:

  1. Recruiters won’t have your artisan font installed on their computer
  2. They’re incompatible with ATS

The first point simply isn’t true if you upload your resume as a PDF (as you should). When you save as a PDF, any custom fonts used get packaged into the PDF file. Anyone who opens your PDF will see exactly what you created.

You’re probably already using a non-standard font. Most Google Doc fonts are web fonts that don’t come preinstalled on computers. I certainly didn’t have Montserrat, Garamond, or Lora installed on my Mac by default but they’re some of the most commonly recommended fonts to use on resumes. LaTeX and the famous Jake’s Resume use Computer Modern which is also a unique font that doesn’t come preinstalled on computers.

Secondly, OCR has gotten pretty good over the past two decades since Workday was founded (maybe they’ll catch up one day). After testing on all the most popular job application software, they don’t seem to have a problem with alternate fonts. Even if you have to use Workday or iCIMS, it doesn’t matter since they’ll force you to manually enter your resume details anyway.

Use your judgement. A font like DM Mono might have issues while being scanned due to its hooked “f”, so use fonts that have standard letterforms but are still unique and beautiful.

There are tons of free premium fonts designed by talented artists. Many font designers will let you use their very expensive fonts for free for personal use. Some of my favorites are:

  1. Pangram Pangram
  2. Atipo Foundry
  3. Klim Type Foundry
  4. Black Beard Fonts

2. Font choice matters, actually

“Most fonts look the same”

“There are two types of fonts: ones that look like Times New Roman and ones that look like Arial”

– My friend .001 zeptosecond before I mauled him to death

I’m pretty underqualified to explain the subtle differences between fonts, but this real designer wrote a great article on how to narrow down multiple similar-looking fonts based on their “feeling”.

Changing fonts does more than change fonts

Whenever I have to write a 4-page 12pt-font essay for a course but I only have 3.5 pages, I change the font to Merriweather and it magically fills the rest of the page.

Despite not changing the actual font size and line height, simply changing a font can drastically change the apparent font size and line height. For example, these fonts are both set at the same pt size, but they look like different sizes when rendered:

I’ve seen some engineers use smaller fonts at 10pt as a cheat to fit more stuff in their resume while still following the 10-12pt guideline. They forget that cheaters never prosper and that they’re only cheating themselves.

3. Use small caps

Small caps are small capital letters — capital letters brought down to the same size as lowercase letters. There are generally two ways to use small caps: for emphasis (ex links in Practical Typography), or to de-emphasize acronyms. When all-capital acryonyms are mixed into sentences, ALL CAPS REALLY STICK OUT. This is especially true for software engineer resumes. Engineers love littering their resumes with big keyword acronyms like MATLAB or REST API in order to appease the ATS gods, but these large uppercase words really stick out in paragrah text and gives the text a “chunky” look.

Small caps make acronyms smaller so the body text looks more homogenous.

It might look a little funny to you and that’s a valid opinion. Oldstyle numbers try to fix the same problem with numbers. Many great designers use oldstyle numbers, but I personally think they look uneven and sloppy. It’s always a matter of taste.

Small caps are a strategic choice when designing a resume. Some people’s strategy is to put lots of big keywords and bold them to make sure recruiters read those keywords first. I choose to do the opposite with my resume. I don’t think the keywords are the best part of my resume. I have good names on my resume so I want recruiters to read them first. I de-emphasize keywords using small caps so their eyes are automatically drawn to the bolded company names.

Small cap rules

Establish some rules and be consistent with it. For example:

I personally follow The Economist’s rules. There are many considerations you need to take when choosing when and where to use small caps. As long as you are consistent, it’s really up to personal taste.

Not all small caps are equal

Small caps are typically as tall as the lowercase letters, but there is some variance and it can make a big difference. In this example, the first font has small caps about the same size as its lowercase letters. The second font’s small caps are relatively much more larger than its lowercase letters.

While I personally prefer the first font, it has many issues that make it a bad contender for a software engineer’s resume. The first font was not designed to be used in mixed case words. “iOS” looks like fully lowercase “ios”, and “PostgreSQL” could be misread as “PostgresQL”. The second font is much less ambiguous and feels more natural to people who don’t know what small caps are.

4. Structural strategies

WIP

Extra tips

Everything you could want to know is covered in the books linked in the bibiography, but here’s some quick tips for any resume to make it look better:

Bibliography

  1. Stop Stealing Sheep by Erik Spiekermann
  2. Practical Typography by Matthew Butterick
  3. Shaping Text by Jan Middendorp