I’ve always had a slight obsession with resumés (a.k.a. CVs). I find the challenge of summarizing all of one’s career highlights elegantly into a one-pager (and it really should only be one page) quite a satisfying exercise. I also think of them as products for recruiters or hiring managers, typically consumed in mere seconds at a time – so it’s fun to craft their design to draw attention to certain sections or keywords.

Over the years, I’ve created literally dozens of iterations of my resumé and have enjoyed turning them into reusable templates to benefit others as well. (Fun fact: one of my first templates was written in CSHTML and shipped with the early public releases of the web development tool WebMatrix.)

When I transitioned into my urban planning career, I initially revamped the HTML version of my resumé using the latest web development techniques. However, as I’ve been picking up skills in Adobe Creative Suite tools as part of my studies, I thought it’d be a good time to try building a new template with Adobe InDesign. Here I’ll share both my new InDesign template as well as my last HTML-based template – I think either could be quite helpful for those looking for a clean, standards-compliant, and flexible document to base their own resumés on.

Hopefully they’ll also prove to be effective in landing your next role, no matter what industry you work in!

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InDesign Template

This version was built with Adobe InDesign 17 (saved as an “InDesign 2022 document” with file extension .INDD). Features include:

• 2-column layout with ruler guides
• A4 sheet with margins that support printing without cutoff on US Letter as well (based on this guide)
• All text formatting with labelled Paragraph Styles (with hyperlinks as a Character Style)
• Individual text frames for all components, all aligned to whole millimeter measurements
• Minimum 10-point font (Raleway) across the whole document

This template would be ideal for someone who wants to balance the presentation of Experience versus Education and doesn’t need a purely chronological timeline. It’s also quite compact and has room to grow, either by shrinking the margins or reducing the font sizes.

HTML Template

This template is a single self-contained .HTML file which should be opened in a plain-text editor. VS Code (the spiritual successor to WebMatrix) is a great option as it has robust support for HTML and CSS highlighting.

Features of this version include:

• Can be opened and printed from any modern web browser (or printed to PDF format with hyperlinks intact)
• Flexible sections that can be rearranged easily in code
• Ability to comment out sections or lines to keep them in the file but not visible when rendering
• Responsive layout that is mobile-friendly
• Option for a photo next to the name
• Valid HTML5 and CSS 2.1

This template would be ideal for someone who is comfortable editing basic HTML or wishes to keep their resumé in a format that can be modified without using proprietary software. The straightforward layout and style consistency between sections makes this template a bit easier to customize to suit your needs – whether you just want a plain chronological timeline or wish to add more creative (and potentially interactive) elements. Obviously, this can be easily embedded into a personal website as well.

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Resumés are always a work in progress, no pun intended. 😀 Please feel free to share any suggestions for improvement on either of these templates, or perhaps your own versions as well!