Caren Hackman Shares Resume Building Tips for Creative Professionals

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Caren Hackman Shares Resume Building Tips for Creative Professionals

Posted on September 20th, 2012 • Category: Art, Helpful Hints

The Rickie Report originally saw Caren Hackman’s wonderful art work and later discovered her blog. We invited her to share some tips on resume makeovers for creative professionals.

For Caren Hackman, being both a fine artist and a graphic designer gives her a unique perspective as a business woman who is a creative professional. TRR readers know that we focus on varied aspects of the art world and strongly believe that having a business plan is an essential part of an artist’s strategy to succeed. After reading her July 25th post, “The One Pager”, we contacted Caren and asked her to share some of her expertise with The Rickie Report readers to discuss what an artist’s resume should include.

“Resume Makeovers for Creative Professionals.”

Because artists are creative professionals, an artist’s resume must reflect their creative spirit with flawless visuals.

I started my report by taking an informal survey of fifteen professional artists to see what their resumes looked like. I was hoping to show some terrific creative CVs and offer tips for others in creating their own. Surprisingly, not one of the resumes gave a clue into the forceful essence that drove each artist’s creative work.

The only thing for me to do … resume makeovers!

Because most artists have websites that offer an in-depth view of their work, the résumé, or CV serves as a one-page summary of their career. Three artists volunteered to have me redesign their resumes. My expertise is in graphic design so I chose not to make text changes to the resume content. Although color and images have been added, I’ve retained a simple, easy to read format. In each instance I used similar principles for the design. I tried my best to capture the essence of each artist’s work.

Below are three steps that I took in the redesign process. You can use them to redesign your own resume.

I created a typographical hierarchy with two to three different sizes. Large for the artist’s name, medium for the headers and small for all of the text.

I chose one or two key images or a detail from the artist’s body of work to be represented on the CV. I studied the best way to have the art and text relate.

In Terre’s I used a section of a pastel and charcoal drawing grid detail as a border.

For Anthony’s I wanted to show that he worked as both a fine artist and designer so I used the art to divide the page.

Candace’s work is playful, sweeping and graceful. I decided to have the art “interact” with the text by allowing the text to wrap around protruding portions of the sculpture images.