Typography and Resume

This week I read the book Non-Designer's Design Book, by Robin Williams (not the actor). I was amazed at how much I really knew nothing about design. She goes through some basic design principles with the acronym CRAP ... Contrast, Repetition, Alignment, and Proximity. She also soes through some basic typography principles. I never realized how much lining things up, and using two different styles of typography on a page could really bring out the design.

So after reading this book online through BYU's databases (great resource for anyone with a byu route-y id), I decided to try and revamp my resume, that was in pretty dire need. This is my old resume:



While I feel like it was decent, I online used one font (Garamond) for headings and body text, I centered each of the dividing lines, making it so that they didn't line up with the body text, and used little if anything to distringuish between headings and body text (just slightly bigger and bolder). So to change it, I decided to line things up better, use a different font for body and headings, and make more contrast between my headings and body text (as well as trim down the actual content). I was pretty happy with how the design came out:




I still want to add a black and white head shot below my name, but other than that I think I'm ready to go job searching (well, actually give this resume to one place already interested in me). I'm excited to see how else I can put my little bit of design knowledge to use!

Twitter

So I found a new hobby - Twitter! Twitter is a social network and micro-blog that allows users to send and read updates (otherwise known as tweets), which are text posts of up to 140 characters.

So while I've been getting acquainted with twitter and a few people I know on there, I found out that you can make your own custom background for your page. And so I decided to get somewhat creative and have fun.

I wanted to do something a little classy, so I took one of my engagement pictures (I flipped it in the final background).

I stretched the background to cover the entire screen, erased the lighter part around me, added a paper texture included in photoshop and sunrays from a brush I have (both the texture and the rays were set to 'overlay' to let the background color show through the texture and brush). I used some cjust font to add my info, and put the logo I made for my (hopefully) future webdesign site, tweaked a little to match better.

All of that, and I ended up with a background I was pretty happy with.

(click on the picture to see the actual site)

I haven't done much with photoshop for awhile, so it was good to get my fill again. I'm loving twitter and encourage everyone to take a look at it. It might not make sense when you first hear about it, but once you get the hang, it's a lot of fun.