You opened a resume template gallery and now you’re staring at 200 options. Some look like works of art. Full-bleed color, sidebar graphics, custom icons, infographic skill sections. Others are stripped-down text documents that feel like they were designed in 1997.
Which direction should you go? The answer isn’t “somewhere in the middle.” The answer depends on your industry, your experience level, and how you’re submitting the resume. But one principle applies to everyone: design should serve your content, not replace it.
When design helps your resume, it makes information easier to find, easier to scan, and easier to remember. When design hurts your resume, it distracts from your qualifications, confuses applicant tracking systems, and signals that you’re compensating for weak content with visual noise.
Here’s how to find the right amount of design for your situation.
What “Good Design” Means on a Resume
Forget aesthetics for a moment. A well-designed resume has three functional qualities:
Clear visual hierarchy. The reader can instantly tell the difference between section headings, job titles, company names, and body text. Their eye moves through the document in a logical sequence without having to figure out where to look next.
Effective use of white space. The page doesn’t feel crowded. There’s breathing room between sections, between bullet points, and around the margins. The content is organized into clear visual groups.
Consistent formatting. Every section follows the same pattern. Every job title is styled the same way. Every date is in the same position. Consistency creates predictability, and predictability makes scanning faster.
None of these require icons, graphics, charts, sidebars, or color. They can be achieved with a basic Word document using nothing but font size, bold, and spacing. Good design on a resume is invisible. You don’t notice it. You just notice that the document is easy to read.
Visual Hierarchy: The Foundation
Visual hierarchy is the single most important design concept for resumes. It determines where the reader’s eye goes first, second and third. Get it right and the recruiter finds your key qualifications in seconds. Get it wrong and they see visual noise.
You create hierarchy with these tools:
Size
Your name should be the largest text on the page (14-18pt). Section headings come next (12-14pt). Job titles and body text are smallest (10-12pt). This size progression tells the reader’s brain what’s most important without them having to think about it.
Weight
Bold text draws the eye before regular-weight text. Bold your name, section headings, job titles and company names. Leave descriptions and bullet points in regular weight. This creates two visual layers: the scanning layer (bold) and the reading layer (regular).
Position
Information in the top left gets read first (in left-to-right languages). Your name, title and summary should occupy this position. The most important content goes on the first page. The bottom of page two is the least-read real estate on any resume.
Spacing
More space above section headings than between items within a section. This creates visual grouping. The reader can instantly see where one section ends and the next begins without reading any text.
These four tools, used together, create a resume that’s easy to scan in seconds. No icons needed. No color needed. No graphics needed.
White Space: What Most People Get Wrong
White space isn’t wasted space. It’s functional space. It separates content into manageable chunks. It gives the reader’s eye somewhere to rest. It signals that you’re confident enough in your content that you don’t need to fill every pixel.
Margins
Minimum 0.5 inches on all sides. 0.75 to 1 inch is better if your content allows it. Dropping below 0.5 inches creates a cramped feeling that makes the entire document harder to read. Some people shrink margins to 0.25 inches to fit more content. Don’t. Cut content instead.
Line Spacing
Body text should be set at 1.0 to 1.15 line spacing. This is the default in most word processors and it works well. Going below 1.0 makes text feel compressed and difficult to scan. Going above 1.5 wastes vertical space.
Section Breaks
Add extra space (6-12pt) between sections. This is more effective than horizontal lines at creating visual separation, and it doesn’t add visual clutter. The reader can see the section boundary even without reading the heading.
Paragraph vs. List Spacing
Bullet points within a section should have consistent spacing. A small gap (2-4pt) between bullets prevents them from blurring into a wall of text during a quick scan. If your bullets are single-line, you can get away with tighter spacing. If they wrap to two lines, add a bit more.
Color: Less Is Almost Always More
Color on a resume has one job: to create a small amount of visual distinction. A dark accent color for section headings or divider lines adds polish. That’s it. That’s all color should do.
What Works
- Dark blue, dark teal, charcoal, or dark green as an accent for section headings
- A thin colored line as a section divider
- Your name in a dark accent color
What Doesn’t Work
- Background colors behind sections (reduce contrast and readability)
- Bright colors (red, orange, yellow) for text (hard to read and unprofessional in most industries)
- Multiple colors creating a “rainbow” effect
- Color-coded skill ratings
- Color used as the primary organizational system (instead of position and spacing)
The Print Test
Your resume will be printed, often on a black-and-white office printer. Open your resume, convert it to grayscale and look at it. If all the information is still accessible and the hierarchy still works, your color use is appropriate. If important distinctions disappear in grayscale, you’re relying too much on color.
Icons: Rarely Worth It
Contact information icons (phone, email, location, LinkedIn) are the most common design addition to resumes. They’re also unnecessary.
A recruiter sees “(555) 123-4567” and knows it’s a phone number. They see “jane@email.com” and know it’s an email. They see “linkedin.com/in/janedoe” and know it’s a LinkedIn URL. The icons add visual bulk without adding comprehension.
Section heading icons (briefcase for experience, graduation cap for education, tools for skills) have the same problem. The heading text already communicates the section topic. The icon is redundant decoration.
If you genuinely enjoy the look of icons and your industry accepts visual design elements, they won’t hurt you. But they won’t help either. And in ATS parsing, icons embedded as images can sometimes interfere with the surrounding text extraction.
Sidebars: A Double-Edged Sword
Sidebar layouts are popular in resume templates. They typically put skills, contact info and education in a narrow column on the left or right, with work experience filling the wider main column.
The Upside
Sidebars organize secondary information efficiently. They keep the main column focused on your experience and achievements. They can make a one-page resume feel less cramped by distributing content across two visual areas.
The Downside
Some ATS software reads content from left to right across the page, not top to bottom within each column. This can scramble your content, mixing sidebar items with main column items. Modern ATS platforms handle columns better, but older systems still struggle.
Even for human readers, sidebars can create problems. If the sidebar is too narrow, text wraps awkwardly. If it’s too wide, it takes space from the main column where your achievements should live.
The Rule
If you use a sidebar, keep it narrow (25-30% of page width) and use it only for genuinely secondary information: skills list, contact info, certifications, languages. Never put work experience or achievements in a sidebar. And always test your sidebar layout through an ATS parser before submitting.
Creative Design Elements: Where the Line Is
Infographic-Style Skill Displays
Skill bars showing “90% proficiency in Photoshop” or star ratings for different tools are everywhere in template galleries. They look modern. They’re functionally useless.
What does 90% proficiency mean? Who calibrated it? What would 100% look like? These visualizations create the impression of data without conveying actual information. A simple list of skills is clearer and more honest.
Charts and Graphs
Unless you’re a data visualization professional and your resume IS your portfolio, charts don’t belong on resumes. A pie chart of your time allocation across different skill areas doesn’t help a recruiter evaluate you. It just takes up space that could hold another bullet point with a real achievement.
Decorative Elements
Borders, ornamental dividers, watermarks, background patterns. These are pure decoration. They add no information and reduce the space available for content. Skip them.
Photos
In North America, the UK and Australia, photos don’t belong on resumes. They introduce bias potential and can cause ATS parsing issues. In continental Europe and parts of Asia, photos are expected. Follow the convention for your target market.
Industry-Specific Design Guidelines
Design and Creative Roles
You have the most design freedom. Your resume can showcase your aesthetic sense. But don’t let design overpower content. The best creative resumes demonstrate design skill through restraint: elegant typography, thoughtful layout, strategic use of a single accent color. Not every design trick at once.
Submit a designed version when emailing directly or attaching to portfolio submissions. Submit a simpler ATS-friendly version through online application portals.
Corporate and Business Roles
Minimal design. Clean fonts, clear hierarchy, professional formatting. One accent color is fine. Graphics, charts and creative elements signal that you don’t understand the corporate environment. Let your achievements speak.
Technical Roles
Engineers, developers and data professionals should prioritize information density and readability over visual appeal. A clean, text-focused resume with good hierarchy is ideal. Fancy design can actually work against you by suggesting you spent time on aesthetics instead of building things.
Entry-Level Roles
New graduates sometimes overdesign to compensate for limited experience. This backfires. A clean, well-organized one-page resume with strong content beats a multi-colored infographic resume with weak content every time.
For font-specific guidance that works across all industries, see our guide on choosing the right font for your resume.
A Design Audit for Your Resume
Run through these questions for your current resume:
- Can you identify each section in under 2 seconds?
- Is there enough white space that the page doesn’t feel cramped?
- Does the resume look professional when printed in black and white?
- Is every design element serving a function, or is it decorative?
- Would removing any design element make the content harder to find?
- Is the formatting consistent throughout (same style for every job title, same position for every date)?
If any answer is no, simplify. The safest design direction is always toward simplicity, not toward complexity. A resume that’s slightly too plain will still get read. A resume that’s slightly too designed will get scrutinized.
The Template Question
Templates are a good starting point. They provide structure and save you from making basic design decisions. But not all templates are created equal.
Avoid templates with: heavy graphics, unconventional layouts, columns that can’t be rearranged, forced design elements that you can’t remove and non-standard fonts that won’t render on other computers.
Look for templates with: clear section separation, consistent formatting, easy-to-modify structure, ATS-friendly layouts and professional-but-not-flashy design.
1Template offers professionally designed templates that maintain the right balance: enough design to look polished, enough restraint to parse cleanly through ATS software and print well on any printer.
The One-Sentence Rule
If you can’t explain why a design element is on your resume in one sentence, remove it. “The bold headings create visual hierarchy” is a valid reason. “The sidebar keeps secondary info organized” is a valid reason. “It looks cool” is not a valid reason.
Every element on your resume should earn its place by making information easier to find, easier to read, or easier to understand. If it doesn’t do any of those things, it’s clutter. And clutter works against you, no matter how attractive it is.
