Creative CV templates and a designer example

Let the portfolio do the showing

Creative directors, studio leads and in-house brand managers open the portfolio to judge your work. They read the CV to find out how you work: who you have worked with, how big the projects were, what you owned and what happened after launch. A CV that tries to be a portfolio, with thumbnails, a mood board or a personal logo, usually does both jobs badly.

So write the CV like a design rationale. For each role, name the kind of client or product, the brief, your part of it and the result. "Designed packaging for a range of 12 sauces for a regional food brand, from concept to print-ready artwork; the range went into two national supermarket chains" tells a hiring manager far more than "Created eye-catching packaging designs".

Designed or plain: who reads it first

This is the real question behind every creative CV. The answer depends on the route your application takes.

• Emailed to a studio, or handed over by a recruiter who knows the creative director: a designed layout with a sidebar and an accent colour is fine, and a well-set page says something about your eye.
• Uploaded through an online job system at a large company, agency group or public body: use a single column. Application tracking software can read two-column layouts out of order, and the text a recruiter searches on may never be found.
• Unsure: send the plain version. A clean single-column CV never costs you an interview. A pretty one that arrives as scrambled text can.

Two of the three templates on this page, Modern Professional (Two-Column) and Sales & Marketing, have a sidebar. They suit studio and agency applications sent to a person. The Freelancer Portfolio template is single-column and is the safer pick for online forms. Many designers keep both versions and choose per application. You can check how a system might read yours with the free ATS CV checker.

How to link your portfolio so it gets opened

1. Put the link in your header, next to your email, as a short readable address rather than a long tracking URL.
2. Point it at a page built for this job. If you want an in-house packaging role, the first projects a visitor sees should be packaging.
3. Make sure it opens on a phone without a password. If some work is under NDA, say "further work available on request" rather than locking the whole site.
4. Mention two or three projects by name in your CV so the reader knows what to look for.
5. Check every link in the exported PDF. A broken portfolio link on a designer's CV is hard to recover from.

What not to do

Skill bars and star ratings are the mistake that turns up most on design CVs. "Photoshop: four out of five stars" means nothing, because the scale is yours and nobody knows what five is. List the software and say what you use it for instead: "Illustrator and InDesign for identity systems and print; Figma for web and social templates; After Effects for simple motion." That line is also what a recruiter will search for.

Also avoid headings set as images, text on photographs, icons in place of words for phone and email, and fonts so light they vanish when printed. A creative director should notice your typography because it is good, not because it is hard to read. And leave the photo off. It is not expected on a UK CV, whatever your field.

Freelance, studio and in-house work

Freelance work belongs in your experience section as a proper role, with dates, not tucked into a footnote. Title it "Freelance graphic designer", then list the clients by type and the most substantial projects under it. If you freelance alongside a job, add it as a separate entry with the same dates. A long list of tiny jobs reads as scattered, so group them: "Brand identities for six independent food and drink businesses".

Moving from a studio to an in-house role, as in the example CV, means showing you can work inside one brand for a long time. Pick studio work that ran across many touchpoints for a single client, where you kept a system consistent, briefed printers or worked with a marketing team. For content, copywriting and marketing roles the same rules apply: name the channel, the audience and the result, and link to published work.

Graduates can treat live briefs, competition entries and the degree show like jobs. Give each a line with the brief, the audience and what you made, and say which pieces are in your portfolio. A placement year, a student union role designing event posters or paid social media work for a local business all count as experience. Put them under a proper heading with dates.