We’ve all used Word, but the ins and outs of styles and visual design are often overlooked by those of us who work with our voices more than our computers.
If you were a music major, or have been to Classical Singer conventions and events, you’ve probably been coached in how to write your résumé—what goes on it, what stays off it, order, names, dates. Hopefully, you have the content down by now. But what about presentation? How do you take the metadata of your career and turn it into an attractive package, not just a jumble of off-centered lists? You don’t need a graphic designer’s training to use some basic features of Word to polish your paper-based presentation.
Fonts
Choosing a font can be overwhelming. Your copy of Word probably has over 100 built in, plus you can always download more. Flipping through all the options in the typeface drop-down menu can be time consuming, and many of the options just won’t suit your purposes. (Step away from the Comic Sans.)
To narrow things down, it might help to consider whether you want a serif font or a sans serif font. Serifs are the little “feet” at the ends of the strokes. Typefaces with serifs are often viewed as traditional, while sans serifs are considered more modern. But that’s not the only factor to consider. Common wisdom says that serif fonts are better for reading in print, whereas sans serifs are better for on-screen reading. Do you think your audience will print your résumé out, look at it on their computers, or both? Another standard piece of advice is to use sans serifs for headings and serifs for body text, but résumés don’t really have a lot of “body text” in the traditional sense—more lists and tables than paragraphs.
Further, a study I completed in grad school suggested that sans serif fonts are much better for “busy” documents—that is, if you’re trying to cram a lot of information into a page, serifs add clutter. So if you find yourself struggling to fit a lot of career onto a single page, sans serif is probably the way to go.
Popular serif fonts are Times New Roman and Georgia, and popular sans serifs are Calibri and Arial. If you want to spend a lot of time experimenting with every option in Word, go ahead. If you want to just pick something and move on, try one of those.
Photo
Should you include a thumbnail of your headshot on your résumé or not? It’s not the norm in the U.S., but if you’re attractive, look like the characters you’re trying to portray, and have a great photo, why not? Just keep in mind the following:
• Microsoft Word is not an image editing program. It has some capabilities, but to avoid driving yourself crazy, edit an image to the right size and color scheme (black and white or color) in another program, save it, and import it into Word as you want it.
• Résumé paper is not photo paper. If you’re printing your résumé onto nice résumé stock, a photo may appear grainy. If the quality of the photo is too poor, you may want to nix it all together.
• If you’re sending your résumé digitally and expecting the recipients to print it, keep in mind that their printer might not be the best. You might come out with stripes across your face, or unexpectedly in black and white. In this case, again, it might be best to leave the photo off.
You can use the Insert menu to browse for and select your photo file. Placement may take some trial and error: as with HTML, images in Word are placed “inline,” which means that they are treated like another word in a paragraph, so it might end up in the middle of a word or sentence.
Themes
Don’t have a graphic design degree? Not a problem! Microsoft has done the work for you in their themes.
Depending on your version of Word, you can access the themes from the Page Layout or Home menu. (You can create similar effects by using the Change Styles/Quick Styles feature on the Home tab under Styles.) The themes contain colors and fonts preselected to compliment each other—all you have to do is assign “styles” to the different elements of the page (see below). Some versions of Word may allow you to change color schemes independently of the theme.
One thing to keep in mind, though: modern Word themes are designed to be looked at on a computer monitor or to be printed professionally. So if a person you send your résumé to is going to print it on a black-and-white printer, light colors might be difficult to read when rendered in b&w. It’s a good idea not to go too light in color choice anyway, since even too-light colors printed on a color printer can be hard if not impossible to read.
Styles
How do you distinguish your headings and titles? Do you center them, enlarge the font, or embolden? You don’t actually have to do any of that. All you have to do is select a style.
The Home menu contains a Styles section where you can assign a “function” to any section of your document. Simply highlight the words you want to style and select a style from the drop-down Styles list (or open the Styles pane for more options). Most of what you will use are the headings—levels 1-6, with 1 being the biggest and 6 being the smallest. You might also use the Title style for your name and Fach, and the Subtitle or one of the many Emphasis options for your address and phone number.
Why use styles instead of changing the look of your headings manually? Besides corresponding with the built-in themes, styles are helpful because if you change your mind about the look, you can update everything at once. For example, if you decide you want your level 2 heading to be smaller, you can find it in the Styles pane and edit it by selecting Modify Style. That will change every heading 2 in the document. You can also select a different theme, which will change every styled element in the document to match the new theme, all with a single click.
Tables
Are you tired of pressing the Tab key over and over again to make your columns line up? It’s a pain, because if one entry runs too long, you either have to re-tab everything to the new location, or manually insert a line break. Not a scalable model.
What you really want is a table. Tables in Word are highly customizable, and you can erase the borders so that no one will even know it’s a table.
Insert a table from the Insert or Table menus and take a guess at how many rows you’ll need—you can always add more later. Then you can check off options for a header row (the top row, where you’ll put something like “Role,” “Opera,” “Company,” and “Year”) and to differentiate the first column (if you want to highlight the contents of the first column, for instance, have all the roles in bold or in color). This works similarly to styling. You can change these selections later as you play around with the Table Styles.
Once you have your table in place (you can choose to fill it out first, or not), you may want to erase the borders so the table looks less cluttered. From the Borders menu, select None (or any other option you prefer). You can also style the table from the Table Styles menu. There are many options for table styles: you can select from any color in the theme, first column and header row in a different color or border style, or whether every other row or column is shaded. Just keep in mind that with tables, less is more. Put in only enough to make it readable. Excess lines and colors just look overcrowded.
When you walk into your next audition with your hair done, your dress pressed, your shoes polished, and your lips as glossy as your headshot, don’t let your résumé be the weak link. Directors may spend more time looking at your résumé than at your performance, so make it look as good as you do!
