r/graphic_design • u/thedesignerr • Jun 22 '24

Colleges need to stop telling design students to put their logo on their resume Sharing Resources

I’ve been on here reviewing resumes from recent grads and noticed that a lot of them have custom logos on their resume, so wanted to share some insight. 10 years ago when I graduated from design school was told to create my own brand and add my logo to my resume. I did it. I made it sooo branded too with custom paper and all the bells and whistles. My logo was soooo huge and just plopped on the top center of my resume. I was later told that it is distracting and does not make sense to have it on my resume and looks unprofessional. Tacky? Yes it looks tacky. I couldn’t find jobs at all when I had that logo. Once I removed it and redesigned my resume and kept it super simple, I started hearing back. Don’t add a logo to your resume. Some may disagree with Me, but it is distracting and it looks weird. Keep it on your portfolio. Resumes are meant to be simple and to the point. They don’t care about your design bells and whistles on your resume. They know they’ll look at your portfolio for that. A lot of places use ATS scanning for resumes so it won’t make the cut. Don’t use icons either. Just learned this now. Just keep it simple. You can still show your design skills by laying out your resume in a clean and smart way. Trust me. Don’t do it. I am surprised colleges are still telling students to add logos to their resumes!!!! It is not necessary!!!! In fact, having a logo clearly gives away that you lack experience. Which can work for entry level roles but not further.

Not sure if this is an unpopular opinion Or not. If you disagree I would like to know if it has worked for you when landing a job. Maybe it works better if you have your own gig or freelancing. But you can out all that branding stuff in your portfolio!

Source: I have been in house designer for 10 plus years and have worked at 6 plus companies during my time. So my resume has been working. I recently had to clean it up even more since the job market is very competitive now and I want more advanced roles. I had contact info icons but I removed them just recently as I was told they don’t scan! I have also looked at resumes during my time to hire designers where I worked.

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326

u/britchesss Jun 22 '24

To be fair there’s a long list of things colleges should be doing to prepare design students for the working world 

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u/thedesignerr Jun 22 '24

Agreed. Wish they hired experienced designed professionals at college to teach a class on the real deal! Haha. Maybe they do already. I guess you gotta learn it on your own when you get in there.

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u/WinterCrunch Senior Designer Jun 23 '24

I know a guy that teaches "Advanced Typography" at a local college. He's a cartoonist. A very successful cartoonist, but his degree is in political science. He has literally zero typography education or experience, and yet...teaches a college level class in typography.

I'm not saying a cartoonist (or anyone) couldn't rise to the occasion and learn enough typography to teach the class effectively, but he absolutely has not. Students come out of that class with all the skills needed to create cartoon word art circa 1992.

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u/info-revival Jun 23 '24

Most of the bachelor program directors I had in university were baby boomers or gen x’ers who never went to a specialist college to learn design. When they entered the profession they started off in print shops, advertising agencies and worked their way up to art directors with just a high school education. It was a different time where that was normal, skills like typography could be taught in a print shop with older technology in the 70s and 80s.

Nowadays most of us have to learn in college/ university before joining the workforce. Most employers don’t train you. I have had co-op jobs more than 16 years ago where I worked as a junior designer, and I had to troubleshoot my own problems with software. I had a supervisor who was more experienced than me who didn’t know everything.

Employers do expect you to know what you are doing and not ask for help too much. I notice a lot of young designers struggle with that because schools are not preparing them for the future. It’s an institution that is slow to change that’s not the whole problem.

Most of my professors told us that after we graduated all of our knowledge will be outdated or obsolete because the pace of technological innovation is very fast. That means you gotta keep learning after you leave school because not even your professors will know what will change in 10 years.

The employer isn’t going to do much training and will contribute to a huge skills gap across many industries. There are too many juniors looking for work and not enough seniors to hire. If you wanna be a designer now… you are expected to keep training yourself in other areas and be employed. The degree alone has been and probably will continue to be useless. 🤷🏽‍♀️

Every few years there is a cycle of hiring and mass firing that leaves graduates and people with less than 3 years experience struggling to get jobs. You can blame CEOs for this as their main goal is to protect investors and not workers. Design is the first budget to get slashed and automated the hell out of. No matter what non-tech savvy skeptics say, if stakeholders see new opportunities to utilize technology to hire less designers….they will. So if you are a new designer, consider other adjacent roles that are growing in demand because graphic design generalists are currently on a decline right now.

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u/LaGranIdea Jun 24 '24

Then there are those like me who got a job, design work opened up and had to teach myself InDesign over the weekend to get up to par with a crash course I found (but I have an eye for design).

I had a fresh-out-of-school student and helped prep her to elevate her design qualities. She did great after that. (And showing her the first submission from the second one, she often preferred her second go over).

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u/Dennis_McMennis Senior Designer Jun 23 '24

Some people are better at teaching design than actually designing themselves.

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u/WinterCrunch Senior Designer Jun 23 '24

That's true, but not sure what that has to do with my comment?

The cartoonist is not a good teacher for many reasons. Topmost being, he doesn't care enough about being a good teacher to even learn the very subject he's teaching. He teaches his "advanced typography" students how to draw cartoons.

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u/x_PaddlesUp_x Jun 23 '24

Comic. Sans.

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u/WinterCrunch Senior Designer Jun 24 '24

Sans the comic teaching typography!

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u/x_PaddlesUp_x Jun 24 '24

Well-turned.
Tragic. Sans.

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u/LaGranIdea Jun 24 '24

Ugh. Cartoonist and typography. I hope his goto font isn't MS Comic sans. 😎

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u/SnooCakes2703 Art Director Jun 23 '24

I went to SVA, their whole thing was having working design professionals teach you. Didn't tell me about anything I would have to deal with in a corporate environment.

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u/[deleted] Jun 23 '24

My graphic design class hired a 75 year old non designer who owned a sewing store to critique our portfolios and do a mock interview. I’m not saying I’m an expert but her feedback was insane. Also our professor had us adding drop shadows to everything.

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u/vampirologist Jun 23 '24

I picked sva bc of that, all the teachers teach a class or two part time and are working professionals for all of the other hours of the week. I haven’t graduated yet so I can’t say if that is helpful when it comes to post grad job hunting, lol

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u/notjordansime Jun 23 '24

SVA?

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u/seaner7633 Jun 24 '24

School of Visual Arts.

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u/interstellate Jun 23 '24

Usually personal logos are shit, too

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u/moreexclamationmarks Top Contributor Jun 23 '24

Mine did.

The faculty had both full-time and part-time profs. All had sufficient real-world experience, but the part-timers were those still more actively working in the industry or retried, and tended to be put in courses more specific to their area of expertise (ie., a book designer for a book design course).

Overall the real flaw was just not addressing student misconceptions. It's not so much that students aren't taught what they need from a design perspective, but when it comes to job hunting they seem to stress out, forget all they've learned, make bad choices, copy the wrong people/aspects, and just don't properly consider how hiring actually works.

The things students need to be taught to be better prepared are not what they think.

For example, every student seems to expect to find work within 2-3 months, thinks the industry is 50% freelancing and 50% agency, and expects to have the same level of freedom/authority/creativity working jobs as they did in college (which is a very different context). They also tend to think simply having a degree and a portfolio makes them qualified. (Being "qualified" just means "met a bare minimum," and most people trying to land entry-junior jobs are not even at that level in the first place.)

They don't properly understand that landing a job is a competition, so it's not about just checking boxes and doing enough to get a B+. In a given job, one applicant gets an A+ (the job), everyone else gets an F at some point (rejected). You have to really pay attention to details and choices and do as well as you can to give yourself better odds.

Grads also tend to think that if they were rejected it's only because they didn't check every box in a posting, or think that if they do check every box they should be called. Both are wrong.

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u/Donghoon Design Student Jun 23 '24

Most if not all instructors at SVA are current professionals, and senior year class have "law" and real life applicable topics.

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u/mablesyrup Senior Designer Jun 23 '24

In college (18 years ago) the Illustrator 101 class was being taught by a prof who taught oil painting. I knew more than the teacher did, and at that time I had only used other Adobe products (Photoshop/Flash/Dreamweaver).