Kim Stuart branding: Creative CV

As part of her promotional pack, Kim requires a creative CV to send out to companies. 

Originally, I liked the style of this art piece by Annegret Soltau (see fig 1) I thought that the combination of a photograph, stitching and irregular piece of text worked really well together and brought a personal touch to the CV. However, the piece is a fairly bold statement and coupled with the rest of the pack and the fabric within the envelope will be too much. I think a more personal touch like a photo could be added elsewhere within the pack.

fig 1

In order to let Kim's work and the handmade style of the promotional pack speak for itself, the CV should be cleaner and less handmade. This is also important considering it will be looked at by companies, so needs to look professional.

Kim is particular with what she wants within her work which I find helpful, as she gives me a definite direction to work in. Her inspiration for her CV is below and have a definite style.

fig 2

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As I mentioned Kim is very particular and sent me over an example of what she wants her CV to look like (see fig 5). I will experiment with layouts, composition and type within this example, but keep the banner as it seems to be a design Kim is interested in.

fig 5

As decided in earlier stages of the project, the promotional pack is created on A4 mountboard, in order to fit into a packing envelope. The way that the pack is assembled, with the pieces of fabric sewn to the mount board, and the content to fit inside this fabric, means that the CV cannot be A4 in size and must be a custom size.

After creating a paper model of the pack, the best size to create the CV was a sheet width 165mm and height 200mm (see fig 6). This may be too small to fit all of Kim's content onto.  

fig 6

fig 7

As you can see by above (figure 7), I was unable to fit all of the text in Kim's CV onto the size of the page, even in 10pt text. Making text any smaller would leave it hard to read. This will mean I will need to alter the page, either by making it fold as in a book, or fold upwards as in a leaflet fold.

I chose to make the CV into a book fold so the information will be spread across 2 pages as opposed to one.

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fig 9 

fig 10

Experimenting with the layout of the text was vital in the process of creating this CV. As there is so much text the reader needed to not be put off by the appearance. Instead of having each paragraph running across the page (as in figure 9) I wanted to organise some sections differently. 

As the publications and exhibitions sections were in list form, I decided to display them in this way. This diversified the appearance of the text and made the page more interesting and less daunting to look at.

fig 11

So that the booklet would not need to be printed double sided, I chose to arrange the CV a bit differently. By swapping the information across sides, the CV will now show the yellow sidebar on the right when folded, and all information within the booklet hidden within it. The yellow bar on the left of the book (see fig 11) will be cut off in order for the bar on the right to show.

fig 12

To break up the large amount of text and create some variation over the page, I altered the appearance of the subheadings (see fig 12). The name of the event/company was made bold and Kim's job role within these events is in a lighter grey colour. This makes the text more appealing to look at by breaking it up.

We did a test print of the CV to look at it in a real-life context as opposed to just on a screen to see which paper would be best to print onto, and also check readability.

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Kim was happy with the result but I felt as if I could improve on it a bit further. The text still needs to be broken up more as it felt too wordy. 

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Highlighted in pink above are the elements of the CV I think could do with adjusting.

- Contact information needs to be more prominent

- titles could be bolder, make the pt size smaller (?) change colour

- boxes around the information in the sidebar altered or removed.

fig 16

fig 17

fig 18

The subtitles for each section, in my opinion, did not look very deliberate. Making them bold made them stand out more. Dropping the point size and altering the tracking to 120 makes the headings more prominent (see fig 17).

Initially, I wanted to have the titles in yellow to create a more interesting page of text, but the issue with this is that yellow is not easily legible on a white page. Instead of changing the colour to a darker tint which would disrupt the overall colour scheme, I decided to add an underline to separate the titles from body text (fig 16). Giving the line a thicker stroke (fig 18) again added more colour to the otherwise monochrome page, tying the yellow sidebar into the rest of the design and making it more consistent.

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Also altered was the information contained within the sidebar. Whereas before the skills and education sections were contained in boxes, now the information is more open and this matches the rest of the CV. Removing the boxes also makes the text easier to read, instead underlines are used under the subheadings as in the rest of the design (see fig 19) Text colour for the school and year as well as years of experience in each skill has been changed to a lighter grey (fig 20) to vary the text and make the most important information more important. 

Contact information for Kim has also been changed. The different modes of contact have different shades of grey as their text colour, to match the rest of the CV, and the boldness and tracking have been upped too, as the information is important.

fig 21

The final CV was printed on 165gsm matt white card. The creative CV began as a challenge due to the copious amount of text, but the end result is a well structured and inviting CV which varies from others due to its book format and unusual fold.