Week 4 | Resume Rationale | Mao

This design project was intended to communicate a sense of professionalism, both elegant and visually clean without modifying the main intent of a resume. In doing so, I chose to use the serif typeface, Adobe Jenson Pro for both my wordmark and headers. This oldstyle typeface came in many different variations, which I felt very helpful in distinguishing the headers from the actual experience/education titles. However, to contrast this formal look, I chose to use Avenir, a geometric sans serif typeface for the body of my resume. At the 35 light weight, the text offers a distinction between the italicized Adobe Jenson, giving it a modern semblance, meanwhile also drawing attention to the change in font size. One concern was if this typeface had too large or round counters-- there was a condensed variation, however I found the tracking too tight and hard to distinguish. For the lists of experiences, I chose to use a square bullet found in the Zaph Dingbats collection of glyphs. I chose this bullet (instead the the conventional round pixels) to complement the round contours of the Avenir typeface. The two colors chosen for this piece included black and a deep auburn, used for part of my name and italicized titles. The auburn gives the resume a professional flare, which shows nicely on the type of resume paper I have chosen.

A couple problems I encountered was the spacing and leading between lines and sections of the body. Before using bullets, I had my experience section separated purely leading, which began to resemble a paragraph style. In some areas, I had to compensate text for white space to make the resume look balanced on both sides of the margin. In addition, I was not sure how effective the layout of this resume appeals to the designer’s perspective, as far as innovation and creativity. In maintaing this elegant, professional scheme, I felt limited to experiment rather “avant garde” techniques that I may have exploited in other venues.